[Untold Prophecy]

Howdy everyone! So, I think I have a pretty typical problem here, but unfortunately, my google-fu has returned a few fixes that don't seem to be working for me when they are for everyone else. Uh-oh.

In short, I was watching youtube videos in my bed one night, and eventually passed out. As I always do when I leave something on and fall asleep, I woke up later, and very sleepily turned off my computer by just holding down the power button. My laziness usually doesn't cause anything bad to happen, but when I turned on the computer the next day, one of my hard drives appeared unformatted and labeled as "Local Disk".

So, a bit of googling later, I downloaded test disk to try and repair the partition table, or something like that. See, I'm not entirely sure what the problem is, but I know for a fact that all of my data is indeed on the hard drive. When I run testdisk, I can go in, and see every file on there, and everything looks perfectly fine on the partition that it finds.

However, when I go to write the partition back to the drive, I reboot, and nothing has changed. I've tried this twice, and both times it's the same story. It also takes my computer ages to try and boot when the hard drive is hooked up, since it's probably throwing a fit trying to read that drive.

Thoughts?
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Tech Support Guy System Info Utility version 1.0.0.2
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium, Service Pack 1, 64 bit
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 870 @ 2.93GHz, Intel64 Family 6 Model 30 Stepping 5
Processor Count: 8
RAM: 16374 Mb
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560, 1024 Mb
Hard Drives: C: Total - 60954 MB, Free - 9331 MB; I: Total - 305170 MB, Free - 124750 MB; K: Total - 476821 MB, Free - 191986 MB; M: Total - 1907599 MB, Free - 423454 MB;
Motherboard: ASUSTeK Computer INC., SABERTOOTH 55i
Antivirus: Norton Security Suite, Updated and Enabled

[ekim68]

Try rebooting and tap F8 while it's starting up and see if you can go into Safe Mode and do a System Restore.

[Untold Prophecy]

Apparently I don't have any restore points set - though I've never turned it off. Strange, and a little aggravating considering it's supposed to be on by default, but that doesn't look like an option now.

[captainron276]

Could be your Norton Security Suite that has caused System Restore not to function.

http://community.norton.com/t5/Norto...ers/td-p/27141

[Untold Prophecy]

I would say that's the ticket right there, but unfortunately, it's not the case. I just don't have any restore points at all - not that the restore points don't function. Apparently, the designated space for system restore was set to 0%.

At the same time, apparently since my drive is currently in the RAW format (with the data buried under there somewhere, and it IS there) system restore doesn't even acknowledge that there is a drive to restore to. My other hard drives turn up fine though.

Tried testdisk again, just to see - and yep, finds the partition, the files, but rebooting doesn't show me any change in that hard drive. Can anyone recommend another program to use that can repair the drive/grab the files from it? There were programs installed to the drive, so I'm not sure if just copying the files and then reformatting before throwing them on there again will let me use those programs, or if they have to be reinstalled.

Might also need some help in using those programs, since they probably don't have a step-by-step for all situations?

[Untold Prophecy]

I ended up just copying as many files as I could off of the hard drive with testdisk (which was surprisingly almost all of them.. two folders of uneeded data couldn't be recovered) and just formatting the drive, and then tossing it all back on again.