My computer crashed can anyone help me here?
Asked by
Cruiser (
40454
)
June 1st, 2011
My computer reported bad sectors and then shut down and restarted. No desk top icons or program files listed, no doc files of any kind. C drive appears empty, yet my quick launch Icons are still there and those programs work and I can indirectly activate some programs but cannot find them listed in “C” drive or in the start menu. Restore won’t work either. I ran all the virus scans I could and still nothing. Never seen anything like this before.
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6 Answers
Sounds like the hard drive has failed and some of the sectors are damaged. You could try running chkdsk which can sometimes sort a HD failure, you could try a full format which may help but in the end you may need to bite the bullet and get a new HD.
Try running chkdsk /f (the ”/f” is the “fix” option).
Otherwise I think I agree with @Lightlyseared that this seems like a major hardware failure.
One other option is to just turn off the machine tonight, walk away from it for now, and then try a re-start in the morning. If that’s successful, then do an immediate “new” backup (you don’t want to corrupt a good backup you may already have) and make plans to replace the disk.
I have tried your suggestions. What is weird is all the programs still exist according to control panel / system and I can still indirectly access the programs but all the file folders I can activate are empty.
There are 2 user profiles in control panel though one is 5 megs the other is 47 megs and both were “modified” today???
Whats happened is some of the info on your HD is screwed. So the control panel still reports that the programs are there because the registry says they are and its stored on a different part of the HD thats intact.. The part where the desktop icons are stored is gone. It also sounds like at least some of the master file table (the record of where the HD has put everything) is gone.
If you have any important docs photos etc on the drive I’d make a backup copy as soon as possible.
Update…deleted the smaller user profile…didn’t do anything that I could tell. Restarted the computer and gave restore another attempt and this time it worked!! Everything is still here especially my treasured pics! Yay for me! Thanks for the answers folks!
One more update: Whatever hit me yesterday apparently hid my files. On the file menus at the bottom there is a choice for Read Only and Hidden. Read only was colored blue but not checked off so I clicked on hidden and the computer hid what wasn’t there and I unclicked hidden and all my files came back! Weird shit!
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