ok, I have a compaq. The C drive seems to be shot. The computer is very very slow, and when I go into "my computer" The C drive does not show what size it is. The D and E drives show up.

The wierd thing is, the E drive is the same disk as the C drive but its a different partition. Its almost as if the one partition died.


Anyone have any ideas? Is my drive dead? Is there anything I can try to do?

XP or Vista?

sorry, XP Pro service pack 2

back up files to a different physical drive.

fun check disk, it will probably tell you your drive is failing. You can also download brand specific utilities to check for errors.

Its a long shot but it could be a virus or a corrupt install but most likely a failing drive

What about in BIOS? If you go in there does it report the correct size?

Did you ahve an e: drive before? It sounds like someone swapped the drive letters around through disk management from the description. If the C: drive was actually missing you'd have a hard time booting.

I'd suggest looking at disk management.

OK. Go to the command prompt (run: cmd.exe), and type "diskpart" and hit enter.

Once that has initialized, type "list disk" and see what it says. It should list the physical disks of the system. If that sees it properly, it probably isn't a disk issue. You can then type "list volume" to see the partitions - that way, you can see if it sees the C drive properly. If it sees the disk right, but not the C drive, it is probably a corruption issue, or something similar. If it doesn't see it right in either, it could be a hardware issue.