My hard drive just crapped out on me, and I have no idea why. It's only a year old... I had my life on that thing. I kept all of my editing files, my 5000 song music collection, my games, my band's raw music files and posters/logos, my electronic songs I made, all of my school and college essays, and most importantly my video and film projects, including my main short film I've been working on for a little over a year, and was going to be sent to the D.C. film festival.

Luckily, I have my song library on my iPod, but everything is pretty much lost. I kinda backed up my videos, but not my raw and project files. I was hoping if any of you know of a situation like this. It's weird, because I just turned on my computer one day, and it starts to take forever to boot up, and then I get a command prompt message saying something to the effect of "Windows\System folder corrupted. Insert XP CD to repair". I do that, and it says I don't have a hard drive installed, even though the BIOS recognizes the drive. What's going on? For absolutely no reason (I hadn't downloaded anything for a while), it's corrupted completely. Can a virus do this? It seems to have only corrupted my Windows folder, but why can't the system recognize the hard drive, even though the BIOS recognizes. To add to the mystery, I did a Dell hard drive diagnostic, and it passed with flying colors. I did do a MS-DOS hard drive diagnostic, and I got a "return code: 7".

If I DO find a way to access the drive, should I even format it? Is it completely toast, or if I reuse it will it crap out in the future? Also, I'm not impressed with Dell... recently, this system has not been up to par considering it's specs... I was planning on formatting it anyway, but ironically, this is not how I wanted to do it. Some suggestions for some solid computer companies would be great, as I want to get away from the big companies and look into some high-quality machines from lesser-known computer builders.

I'm going to download Knoppix, and I see if I can get an OS running and see if I can access the drive from there. I've tried pretty much everything else... if that fails, I'll install the drive into another computer as a slave drive... maybe that will work.

*Siiigggghhhhh*

Yeah, I'd say your best bet would be to stick it into another computer.

Stick it in another computer, or alternatively boot up Knoppix.

As for computer companies--Dell and Gateway are your best bets with name-brand. I'd suggest getting someone you know who builds computers to just assemble one for a small fee if you buy the parts--it'll be a lot cheaper and a lot more stable.

Sucks though.

Always try sticking it in another computer first.

I just lost a hard drive about a month ago. It sucked.

Your problem sounds similar to one a had about half a year ago or so. One morning I got up and switched on the computer for the sole purpose of backing up all my photos, only to find that it decided not to boot. After asking around and getting help from my computer tech cousin, I stuck a brand new hard drive in the computer, and made my old drive into a slave drive. I reinstalled windows on the new drive and was able to access all the files from my old drive. Hopefully if it's a similar problem, you'll have lost nothing.