My laptop can't "find" my C: drive.

Hey guys, I woke up this morning with quite the problem. I had a powerpoint that I was supposed to give on my laptop this morning for school.. Unless I can get that fixed in 45 minutes then I won't be...

I'll start with this, I have an HP Pavilion dv7. 8GB RAM, 1TB Hard drive, i7 processer@3.00ghz.

Anyways, here's my issue. Normally I don't shut down my computer, I either just leave it in sleep mode or I put it into hibernate. I noticed everytime that I would click my start bar there was the little yellow triangle on my Shutdown button. (signifying the windows updates obviously) I'm normally one to stay away from any sort of Windows updates because I've heard of horror stories in the past, so, normally I just leave them there or check the reliabibility of the update first.

So, I decided to shut down my computer. It took a long time to shut down, longer than normal. The updates took their normal time to install but that wasn't the issue after they had installed it took another 10 minutes for the laptop to power down.

This worried me, I immediately started it back up after this happened..

Here's where it starts, my computer starts up with the Windows Repair loop. But unlike a normal simple fix, this one is a bit more unique. When I enter the recovery stages I notice that it shows "D:" drive. My main drive is my C:, which holds all my data. I enter the BIOS and still no luck with finding the C: drive. I went ahead and opened my computer up to see if I had a loose connection between the motherboard and the hard drive, but everything was fine.

Does anyone have any clue how to fix this? Is there a way that I can locate my C: drive?

Did I somehow get a virus, if so how can I find my C: drive to clean it?

Also, I apologize for any grammar and spelling errors that may be on this post - I am writing this from my iPhone due to not curretly having a computer.

I just typed this in command prompt..

C:\>dir
Volume in Drive C is SYSTEM
Volume Serial Number is (blah blah)

Directory of C:\

File Not Found

C:\>

Nope, the updates were completely done to my knowledge. The reason I know this is the "Restart your computer in 15 minutes" prompt came up, I had immediately selected the "Postpone 4 hours."

I just attempted to run the repair disk, when I clicked on the "C:" hard drive to select an image, I got "You must format the disk to use it." Once I selected it it said "Windows can't format C - Check to see that the disk and drive are connected properly, make sure that the disk is not read-only, and then try again. For more information, search help for read-only files and how to change them."

New error while starting..

Doesn't look very good. Got any backups of your important files (or disk images)...?

I'd remove the hd, use a usb enclosure and connect it to another pc and see if it can be read, as an attempt to recover files you may need. Good luck.

My friend has one, we're going to meet sometime this week and see if we can get something worked out. Hopefully we'll be able to save some of the important stuff on it.. I have tons of projects on the hard drive that I've worked on. (I'm a graphic designer) I was stupid not to backup more frequently...