Hi all, sorry if this might be in the wrong section (and sorry in advance for not being super computer-literate),
I left my HP Envy (Windows 7 x86) on for a little bit while I was in another room, and I came back to the Blue Screen, forcing me to shut down the computer. When I restarted it, I had the following screen:
So clearly something is wrong--the primary partition isn't even showing up (or it could be the hard drive as a whole; frankly I can only guess what each volume and device is, but it's pretty clear all 500 GB of my hard drive is not present). Letting it sit without doing anything let it go on to the next screen, which just said "Boot Device Not Found, Please install an operating system on your hard drive" and mentioned that F2 would lead to System Diagnostics. All of the System Diagnostics came up okay, which surprised me some. I tried looking through both the BIOS and Configuration Utility and neither contained anything that seemed helpful and actually worked. I tried booting up Ubuntu from a flash drive and was able to. In "GPARTED" my primary drive/partition did show up either. Okay, so that didn't work. Next I tried using a Windows 7 Recovery Disk (using an external CD drive)--it started booting up but then came up with nothing but a message saying "Recovery Not supported under current configuration, please enable acceleration option for Intel Smart Response Technology and try again." After attempting to change a few settings in the few windows I could access, nothing changed.
What do you think is the problem? Can the files be recovered (very recently I created a system restore point if that helps)? I fear the worst (hard drive failure, especially because it is making weird noises once turned on), but still hoping it might not be.
I don't know if an install disk would work or not--I can not try because the Microsoft "Software Recovery" website is not working currently and I have no other means of accessing one at the moment.
The past week I've been battling a huge Malware nightmare (kind of an adware cluster-bombing a boat-load of system files, registries, and anywhere else you could think of) while also trying to deal with a recent Windows 7 update corrupting registry entries and system files (9 in all between the updates and the Malware). This leads me to think it might not be hardware, but what do I know?
Thank you in advance! If you need any more info, pictures of screens, etc. do let me know!