Dead computer

[farmboy]

so, my new laptop i mentioned as the catalyst to figure out and write that tutorial?

It's dead.  BSOD on startup.  Right now I put in the windows install/recover cd in, ran chkdsk /r, and it froze on 74%.

So....what now?  is it at all possible to recover the ~30 hours of work I managed to log on that thing in the two weeks before it died?

[MindlessOath]

try gwscan. its a gateway utility that will recovery defective sectors on your hard drive.

http://support.gateway.com/support/drivers/getFile.asp?id=21280&dscr=GWSCAN%205.12&uid=174926972

its free and works on all computers. it does take about 45mins to run.
do the extended test it will run a quick test first to check smart data (it runs for a min or two). then you have to press a key to start the full extended test.

this utiliity will try to do what ever it can to fix your hard drive, if it cant it will tell you there is a serious hardware failure on ur drive.

if you want to recover the data on your computer you can do that by booting to a linux live cd - there are many to choose from, then burn cd's (usually two cdrom drives are required since running a live cd wont let you open that drive). most linux distros these days have easy interface for most users, you may want to try ubuntu