So okay , THIS happened:
I had finally gotten settled into a rhythm with the new hdd I had to put on the vaio laptop after a sharp knock rendered it unbootable and it complained of the inability to find an OS. I had hoped to try and salvage some data from that drive after getting myself squared and tweaked to my liking with the new one in place running a dual boot setup with XP and a 64 bit windows 7 because I have problems with the latency on 7 within the audio mic inputs and need the XP system for recording and monitoring in real time. I'd actually gotten used to using the laptop while my desktop was out of commission waiting for a new gpu and psu, but I had not actually had access to another suitable drive for back up since the one I had gottn for that purpose had to be used as the new laptop drive, so and naturally, because I am lucky like that, I got up the other day to visit the loo and somehow got entangled in the power charger cord and tugged it off the table onto the floor. Yay. Miraculously, it seemed unharmed.
Until I had to take it with me and it went to sleep. Then it froze on waking or sometime shortly after and a reboot failed utterly with a blank black screen and blinking white cursor and "error loading OS" message and later Not Operating System found. BIOS knows the drive is there and how big it is , but windows can't see it. So now life sucks, as I try to find solutions with the only internet access available to be - the browser on my PS3 via the onscreen keyboard navigation through the dual shock controller... *weeps*
I had experienced a bsod or two recently, which seemed related to graphic pen pad or mouse drivers, but as the error message is the same as the last hdd , Iam wondering if something else is up . might it be a n issue with the dual boot screwing me up since they don't use the same bootloader? Some pages have indicated that my partitions might stillb e there, but that the MBR is toast.
I have my Hiren's cd and no idea where to begin to attempt recovery.
Anyone got any suggestions?