Recovery HELP!

Hello all,

I will start with the problem...

A few days ago my laptop (windows 7) my laptop rebooted by itself but it didn't get any further then a black screen with a white mouse pointer that i could move around. It seems to stay on that screen forever (I left it on for one night, same). I cannot do anything, alt, ctrl, del doesn't work, clicking anywhere doesn't do anything. It was scheduled to do updates at the moment of the crash but i don't think that has anything to do with it, because it wasn't scheduled to reboot when it went into black-screen-white-pointer for the first time (I had clicked 'delay reboot for 4 hours' less then 4 hours before the 'crash')

Solutions I came up with:
Of course I tried rebooting with the Windows CD, but somehow this doesn't work. It gets stuck in the black&white screen of death (from now on referred to as W&HSOD...) before I get any kind of menu. I tried the CD on another computer, on whitch it did work. Yes, I changed the BIOS settings into boot from CD/DVD.
I downloaded RC.iso and put it on a disk to boot from: this gave me some options but when it then continues to boot, gives me a blue screen of death.
I tried the bootup CD from LiveBoot from Wondershare, this gives me a menu with the options 'boot from CD' and 'boot from HDD' and both give me the B&WSOD.
I then stumbled upon Knoppix, put it on a DVD and finally, something worked. It doesn't seem to have any problems. I then checked the HDD in 'Disk Utilities' and it appears to have 5 bad sectors. My HDD is partitioned into 4 ehm, parts? whitch are
1. BIOS_RVY
2. System 3.
OS_Install
4. Data
All are NTFS.
All the bad sectors are in part 3. This part I cannot mount using Knoppix. The 4th part seems to be fine, I can mount it and access and copy my files. Now, had I done regular backups, I would write zeros to the whole freakin' disk (something I eagerly look forward to, muhahaha), reinstall windows and pray that my HDD works fine from there on. But of course I didn't and I have some files that I would really like to have back, so I need to find a way into that 3rd part. I have tried testdisk and found out that a lot of my files are still there, but I still couldn't access my former 'documents and settings' folder. It just didn't find any files or folders there. I also ran PhotoRec, whitch I used to copy everything from partition 3 to an external harddisk, but some files still seem to be missing (or at least unrecognizable) and everything is a complete mess because file names are lost and folder structure too. I then started looking for other programs that could be of any help and came across RStudio for Linux. It also could scan OS_install, but didn't see any folders in Documents and Settings. Furthermore, because it is a demo version, I could not make an image of the partition so I can bomb the HDD with zeros without worries, start using my computer again and try to recover my files using windows, making stuff a lot easier (for me).

So here are my questions:
- Is there any other (free) program that can create an image of OS_Install?
- If PhotoRec couldn't find my files (in origional shape), are they too corrupted to be recovered? But if only 5 sectors are bad, how can my total 'Documents and Settings' folder be invisible for both TestDisk and RStudio?
- How is it possible that it just refuses to boot anything but knoppix from CD? Could it be that a boot from CD is not actually not a complete boot from cd but it gathers some information from the HDD, and that in my case exactly this information is somehow corrupted?
- Does it even make sense to zero my HDD in the hope this solves my problem and lets me boot windows from DVDs again?
- Any other suggestions?

I'm sorry to bother you with so much info and questions, I hope it all makes a bit of sense to you guys... Any help will be very much appreciated!

 

If your getting Bad Sectors, from experience its hard for any recovery software to recover the files if they are on the bad blocks.

Zero'ing the drive is not a promise a way of fixing the badblocks.

Make a Image of the drive with R-Studio and see what you can recover from that image don't keep using the drive more chance of wrecking what ever data is on there.

 

remove your ram first ?

 

No need to remove RAM. Just image with R-Studio and then use the image to try and recover the data