Ok, my laptop was running with the battery out (long story) and we had a power cut. With the power back, it is powering up but then fails to boot from the hard drive. It then prompts me to boot from hard drive, network drive, floppy or CD. It quite happily boots DOS from my USB floppy and Ubuntu as a live distro. However, DOS can't find C: and Ubuntu fails to register it either (the hard drive was formatted in NTFS.) Test disk comes up with Partition: read error and when it quick and deeper searches through it sequentially goes through each cylinder saying read failure (or words to that effect.) It can find the drive, but can't find the partition. Ubuntu installer can find the drive but also fails to recognise it has anything on it. I'm trying to recover files off it before a full windows reinstall. help please...

You need to repair that partition. I don't know that much about free partition tools, but there is a risk that some data will never be recoverable. Try something like Hiren's boot disk to fix it. -------------------- Thor Byrgesen: The one, oh the one computers and all electronics just hate.

Dos can't read an NTFS partition and won't assign a drive letter to it. Is the drive identified right in cmos/bios setup? Is there a drive overlay on it?