Vista x64, HDD trouble.

I was playing Co* Sunday morning (3 or 4 a.m.), hit the ferry to Port Oakes to grab the badges and plaques on my newly minted level 20 Mind/Fire dominator... and never made it past the zone load screen. HDD was at full throttle. I managed to tab out to Mids' after three or four minutes, but that was all it would do. Mids' wasn't responding to anything, neither of the browser windows I had open were responsive, Co* was deadlocked with Port Oakes halfway loaded. Mouse pointer still moved, but clicking got me the same results as using the keyboard, zilch.

After 10-12 minutes of waiting, I decided to risk cycling the power. Got to the welcome screen, never went any further. Waited five or six minutes, rebooted it again, made it to the desktop, but ended up with the same lack of responsiveness. HDD kept churning, system ignored all input.

Rebooted again and tried to go into safe mode, got nailed with a BSOD. Stop 0x7b (boot failure caused by boot virus, corrupted driver or bad MBR).

Another reboot, attempted last known good config, same BSOD.

Next reboot, OS doesn't even start to load. "Error loading OS".

Been pounding my head against this wall for hours now. If this were three years ago, when I was running 2k Server, I would've had it fixed and been back in the game within fifteen minutes, but the tools I used then aren't compatible with 64 bit software or 500GB HDDs. So I'm floundering.

Tried WinPE, can't get it to recognize my HDD (it's recognized by the BIOS and is working, and i can access it with some other utilities), so I can't do a startup repair. Tried UBCD, but the utilities are either too old and don't find the HDD, or not compliant with 64 bit and can't access what's on the HDD, or need information that I can't get, like exactly where my partition tables begin and end (and i'm not going to guess... trying to fix this, not make it worse).

Running out of options and patience. I don't have a 64 bit Vista DVD (was pre-installed on the computer, no x64 media included. A 32 bit recovery disc was included, but I can't use that to fix the problem, only to do a fresh factory install.

Tried a different SATA cable and port, no shiny.

Still scouring the 'net for solutions, but right now, I'm almost to the point of attaching an SATA adapter to an old 80GB IDE drive and trying to install the 32 bit version on that... might be able to transfer everything over to the 500GB drive at some point... Going to try a partition manager (or three... or five, or however many i can find to monkey around with), and keep digging around online, but if anyone has any suggestions, I'm open to them.

The only reason I bought an off-the-shelf computer this time was because it cost me about $100 less than rebuilding my old gaming rig, and buying a brand new one would give me a 64 bit foundation to work with for my next upgrade cycle. Guess I should have started from scratch after all... at least then I would've had a physical copy of Vista x64 to work with and could have tried a repair installation.

Of all of the things I loved about being a tech, dealing with HDD issues wasn't on that list. Part of the reason I was relieved when I quit doing it. Argh. *sigh*

I think that the HDD issue might be cleared up by booting and doing a CHKDSK. I've always used Spinrite to help out on major HDD errors and the latest version 6 is compatible with NTFS.

Elation! Excitement!

I just switched monitor input over to the other computer (been using my old Win98 box for the last few days, plugged into the second port on my LCD) to check Testdisk's progress, and saw that it had located one named copy of the partition. This is significant because every other tool I've used which has been able to display the partition did so with no name attached.

It's a step in the right direction. Now, if I'm really lucky, Testdisk will be able to repair or restore the MFT. If I'm lucky, but not that lucky, the partition itself will at least still be intact and contain valid data, rather than be empty. I'll settle for that, it'll make recovering from this fiasco much less onerous.

Amusing side-thought: only a Co* player would be this excited over getting a name.

Keeping my fingers crossed for you.

Just remember to keep the sharp pointy sticks away from the HD.

Well, I was able to play Co* this morning, for the first time in over a week. It felt good.

Total data loss, but the recovery partition was intact and Vista x64 is back in place. Fortunately, I had backups of everything important, except for a few e-mails and bookmarks. Everything else, I can recreate (random collections of thought and stories i was working on in text files) or reacquire (downloads).

Still have quite a bit of work to get everything back the way I want it, but the bothersome part is done.

Yay.