My daughter has a Sony VAIO desktop with a Pentium 4 and Windows XP SP2. Friday night she used the computer until midnight, then left it on and went to bed. When she woke up she found that the computer had rebooted and was on the logon screen. She logged on and noticed that it took a very long time for Windows to load. She also noticed that some of her desktop icons were appearing as just a shortcut to a folder rather than the actual icon. I took a look at it and found that her hard drive appeared to have a problem. It's a 60 gig HD, partitioned as a C and D drive (approx. 15 gig for C, 45 for D). What I found was that the C portion seemed to be working fine, but the computer wasn't seeing anything on the D. The D shows up in Explorer, but when you click on it you get an error message: "The disk in Drive D is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?" You can view the D drive in My Computer, but it shows 0 Used and 0 Free. The desktop icons which are showing up incorrectly are her D drive programs. The C and D are the same physical HD, and we're able to use the C, so I'm thinking that the HD is intact. It's not making any strange noises. We were able to use the computer to copy photos from the C drive and burn them to a CD, and could also access the internet. I went to the command prompt, and when I tried to change to the D drive it would come up D:\, but would immediately switch back to C:\. We're hoping she hasn't lost all her files on her D partition, expecially her 8,000 music files. Any suggestions? Thanks.
