On Saturday I went down to Houston for a meeting. I was working on my laptop on the way down, no problems (don't worry, I was a passenger). I closed it without turning it off, which I have done countless times. When I got into the meeting, I opened the laptop, pressed the power button to awake it, and it went into the state between on and sleep. (I'm not sure what to call it, I just didn't hold the button long enough I think) It's done this before, too. I had to shut it down by holding the power button. I already had my flash drive in the USB when I rebooted, but after "loading Windows" the screen became black, though the cursor showed and responded to the mouse. I analyzed the problem to be a miscommunication between the computer and the hard drive with the operating system
After this, I came home, ran many diagnostics, tried booting in safe mode, and checked the BIOS. Finally, I came to the conclusion that I could reinstall Vista on a "Recovery drive" built in to my computer. I did this, and was able to boot. The only problem is that clicking on my hard drive (the D:\ which used to be lettered C:\ and I can't change this) gives me a message saying "D:\ is not accessible. Access is denied."
Since then, I have recovered all of the files on my hard drive in two ways: I have backed them up onto one external drive using Vista's drive back-up wizard, and I have used a SanDisk CD I have called RescuePRO. At this point I am ready to empty the drive and start over, but it won't allow me to format it either. If there is a way to simply re-letter the drive, save the organization of my files, and return to status quo, I would do that first, but I don't mind cleaning it off.
1. How do I format the hard drive so I can reinstall Vista and work off it again?
2. What are possible causes of this whole mess? Spyware that changed the lettering and won't allow reversal?
(Oh, and this handy recovery drive has only 10 GB of which only 46.7 MB are free. This is nerve-racking!)
Thanks for reading.
01-14-2009
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