WIndows boot\C: partition issue

Hello everyone.

I am having an issue with my laptop. I turned it off last night as normal, the os (windows vista x64)was working fine. Today, I got to turn it on and I'm told there is no bootable device. I went ahead and did the start up, run in and hard disk tests, all of which gave me the same results. Primary hard disk self tests, both quick and full test passed. SMART check hard disk passed. The system memory tested ok, memory test passed. There was no info in the error log.

Now here's the thing, in the system recovery tool, I can access the D: partition. (there is only one hard disk and I have a c: and D: recovery partition. However, I cannot access the c: partition as it says it needs to be formatted.

My question is, is my hard drive actually screwed here? Seems odd if it were a mechanical failure that I'd be able to access the recovery partition. Is there a way to restore function to my c partition without wiping everything? And does running the system recovery tool wipe my files? Could this be just an issue with the boot log?

Any insight that could be offered would be greatly appreciated. I've never had to do this before so I'm not really sure what I'm doing.

(as a side note, there were no weird clicks or strange behavioral issues prior to turning off the computer last night. In fact, it was running all too well.)

 

Your last five words were the sign
best bet rip the hdd out place it in a external housing & see if recuva can find anything or minitool or easeus or photorec,word of warning do a read only assuming you want to save some files,if not you can pretty much do what you want with c but before you do create an image file of the D Partition if you decide to attempt a recovery of c partition with any of the software available,to be honest it sounds like blocks on the hdd are stuffed & replace of hdd is necessary

easeus has an imaging tool be sure to also write down the exact size of D Partition in note pad & keep it with the image of D,this is required if you have to replace the hdd & need to recreate D

 

Okay, well here's some more weird info.

I found a boot disk and burned the iso (I know, I'm a jerk for not making one of my own. Lazy). It would not let me access the c: partition but I was able to get the recovery tool to work. I tried the option of checking for start up errors and after doing it's thing for about an hour, it said it had no idea what was wrong and couldn't fix it. So I figured, what the hell, I'll try restoring my comp to the last known good configuration. It wouldn't even launch the program. So I did a restart, figuring I'd try one of the other options and my laptop starts up as if nothing happened at all. I just got an error message stating windows has recovered form an unexpected shut down. (It was shut down properly as always)

I don't know if any of this behavior makes sense to you or anyone else but, given that I got no messages in the error log and no warnings regarding the health of my hard drive from the hard disk self tests, do I have reason to hope my drive isn't dying?

And yes, you're right about the last five words of my post. XD

 

ok so now it's backup & running do a chkdsk on it it will save the chkdsk log to somewhere depending on your version of windows then check & see if any bad fragments were detected

ps:nothing about windows makes any sense..lol..