[DominatingDrew]

2 days ago I woke up and my laptop's screen was blank. It wouldn't do anything so I held the power button and rebooted. Windows started to start up, but it gave a blue screen with an message saying unmountable boot volume. After that It told me to run startup repair, so I did, but it's just a black screen with a mouse. I tried booting with the windows 7 dvd, and the same thing happens. I have probably the simplest BIOS in the world. The only things you can really change are the time, and boot order. A lot of people say to change your hard drive type, but I can't. I ran the hard drive test though, and it said I had a bad hard drive, even though it ran fine for almost 2 years. I have 4 hard drive partions, Windows 7, 8, linux mint, and the recovery. I can't boot to linux or 8. I tried to make a live ubuntu DVD to at least get my files off, but when I try to mount it it says to run ckcdsk /R on a DOS command prompt. Now this morning when I tried to boot it says a disk read error occurred press ctrl+alt+del to restart, and I can't even attempt to start windows. I really need to get the files off of it, a lot of it isn't backed up. I assume it just keeps getting worse, and a smaller chance of recovery. How can I get my files backed up, and hopefully fix it, but I could live with just getting the data off and buying a new hard drive.

[Lance1]

It looks like the drive is on its way out. You could slave the laptop hard drive to another computer via a USB enclosure. Go HERE to learn how.

[DominatingDrew]

Now it boots again, but this time when windows was starting up, I could here clicking coming from the hard drive, then the message again. I think it might be physical damage.

[computersarecool]

Clicking? thats not good. Back up everything ASAP.

[DominatingDrew]

I've tried already, I ordered a USB enclosure off the internet, hopefully i can back it up and fix it using that.