Hello.

When I tried to start my pc this morning, it would stay in the "starting windows" screen.

I then tried to boot in safe mode, but it got stuck after atipcie64.sys

Startup Repair has found nothing.

And now I ran chkdsk. When I checked out C: which is where Windows is supposed to be, it actually had about 100mb of total space in it. Then I checked the D: partition, and it seems it is what used to be my C: o.o

What could have happen? I didn't do anything to the system when it was working fine. What can I do now? Requesting assistance!

Bizarre. Have you tried restarting to see if it's still there. It may be that it had some trouble accessing the partition. There's also a chance that it got re-formatted, though that could be caused by any number of things.

Can you boot off of a linux live CD and check to see if the partitions are indeed fucked or if chkdsk lists C as the recovery partition?

Try also booting using the "User last good known configuration option", and if that doesn't work try an older restart point.

I can't really restart because I can't start in the first place. Well, not Windows, at least.

According to chkdsk, all files are still there, though. I think I could maybe start it if can get C to being C again. It would also be useful to find out what exactly is the small C that has appeared. I think I will try that next. The other options have already failed.

You didn't install something to do with RAID, did you?

Not that I know of.

Also, forgot to mention I'm running a HP notebook, with a single hard-drive. The BIOS has no options relating to it.

EDIT: Also, I tried running the Windows 7 disk to reinstall, but it didn't start either. I think it couldn't recognize what the partitions were.

Ah yes, that does cut down the possibilities. Do you have anything on there of vital importance? If so, can you connect it to another computer to recover it? Only, under these kinds of situations I'd usually just opt for a clean reinstall (as long as HP have provided you with the necessary means to do so).

Are your C: and D: drives just different partitions on the same physical drives? If so then it sounds like there's some serious data corruption on your drive, possibly including a problem with the MBR (which could explain why it's mixing up the different partitions). I'd say your first order of business should be attempting to back up any data you don't want to lose, in case your HDD is close to a catastrophic failure. Then you should try to run a few diagnostics on your HDD (hopefully someone can recommend a bootable utility for this or there may be a way to check in through the BIOS). If it looks like the drive is hosed then just get rid of it, get a new HDD, and reinstall Windows on that. If everything on the drive checks out then you can either try to further troubleshoot the problem or cut your losses and just do a clean reinstall.

All of my personal files are there, but on a separate partition (used to be D, seems to be E now).

I already tried to reinstall windows, but that... Didn't work, as I stated on the edited post above.

I can send the notebook to tech support, but I'd rather try all available options myself before doing that, as I still have some chance of recovering my files.

I'd get it sent off now if you have stuff on there you really need to recover. The more you do now the less chance there will be of recovering it. What you're describing does sound like a hard drive failure of some kind and if so then data loss is likely the more it is accessed.

I'd back up the data if I could, but right now I cannot access it. I didn't try a linux live-cd yet, though. This moment, I'm running chkdsk on the last partition. I tried some bootsect commands, but it doesn't look like they've helped.

I know of a few hard-drive diagnostic tools I'm going to run later. The BIOS options didn't find anything. It's like the partitions have swapped, but nothing was actually corrupted.

Judging by what I have researched on the internet, this seems to be a windows failure more than anything. Besides, I don't believe tech support over here will do anything but put a new HDD in it and send the old one to incineration.

If it's a Windows failure then there would be nothing stopping you from being able to reinstall it. A hard drive failure could have the appearance of various software problems.

I'm not saying that's the case. Maybe if you explained a bit more about what went wrong when you attempted to reinstall Windows it would help.

No problem. Sorry, it's just that I've been working on this all day and I can never remember which details are exactly important.

The windows 7 disk would just hang when I click to install windows, not proceeding to the next part, which, I believe, is where I would see the partitions and choose where to install.

Rather than saying it is a windows problem, I think I can say it is a problem with the HDD, but may not be hardware related. It might have been caused by windows, or by some solution I have tried before. In that case, even if I can reorder the partitions, that might not fix things yet.

Another thing of note, when I tried to run scannow, it said there was an update scheduled to run, and that I should restart windows before using it. Which is odd, because I deactivated automatic windows update. I think this might be related to the problem in the first place. But I think I should do something about the partitions first.

EDIT: Did some research. It seems the odd C: drive is the system reserved partition. It shouldn't have a drive letter at all. How weird.

Don't run any further diagnostics until you back up any data you don't want to lose. Many diagnostics put a fair amount of stress on a HDD, so if the drive is already close to failure doing things like running chkdsk on it can be just what it takes to make it fail completely (I actually had this exact thing happen to me when I was younger and didn't know better).

And as Navagon mentioned, hard drive failures often manifest themselves as Windows failures. I've observed this first-hand on several occasions, where problems with Windows booting, accompanied by error messages about specific Windows files, were indications of a drive about to fail (the error messages are caused by the parts of the drive where the files in question are located becoming corrupt or unreadable).

I've found this link with a problem really similar to mine. I think I will try the presented solution next.

www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/171856-drive-prefixes-changed-windows-cant-boot.html