it did the same thing a couple months ago, and then started working again about 4 hours later

from my own digging on the internet (free of charge), I found out that my hard drive could be fixed, and thus saved, by the use of the operating system disk on boot up. Since my hard drive wasn't apparently physically damaged (no clinking or knocking noises), if there was a real, serious issue with it, this could possibly fix it. i inserted the disk, booted up using the disk, and selected recovery. i then commanded to CHKDSK C: /R, allowing it to search the hard drive for the information on there (recovering), and fixing partitions if it could. and what do you know? i'm now back on my computer. while it remains to be seen if it is a serious issue and i'll be on for long, i do not know. but i'm on long enough that i can now make backups (i know, i should've been doing it all along) and that was the main issue, not losing 2 years worth of files.

Just giving a simple 'you're screwed' isn't always the answer, and taking the time as an 'expert' to try to exhaust all means is the desired result. if i hadn't seen this on the internet, i probably would have had to pay a lot to have somebody try to rip my files off of an operatable hard drive unbeknownst to me.

thanks