So yesterday, I forcibly restarted my Windows 8 PC. VMWare Workstation was having some trouble with the guest Linux Mint OS. It wasn't responding for some time, so I tried suspending it September 28th or perhaps even before. It wouldn't suspend -- I forgot what the window looked like, but all options in the power menu were disabled (i.e. "Shutdown," "Power Off," and options like that were all disabled). I eventually killed the VMWare application through Task Manager, though I was too lazy to hunt down the running virtual machine itself, and decided to kill it by just shutting down my PC entirely.

The PC wouldn't shut down for quite some time after the monitor went blank, so I did a cold reset by holding the power button. I then powered it on again and Windows briefly gave me some message like "Search for KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR." Windows then started diagnosing some problems and gave me the message, "Repairing disk errors. This might take over an hour to complete." That was yesterday night, and I went to sleep without waiting for it to finish.

This morning, it said that the repair failed, and that the log was at C:\windows\system32\LogFiles\srt\srtTrail.txt (as I remember it -- I don't have the exact path I wrote down right now). It gave me some other options to troubleshoot, such as resetting Windows (files and settings still intact, but programs not installed through the app store will be erased). That didn't work (no error message given, I was just told it didn't work). I tried rebooting in safe mode, the same diagnosis process begins, except that this time it doesn't bother with the automatic repairs again.

So I tried using the command prompt to try to see if my files are at least still there. I was on the X drive, and I couldn't cd to the C drive. I couldn't find my folder under Users (of course?), and couldn't find the srt folder under LogFiles either.

I am not sure what to try next. I have backed up everything, but to the cloud, so if absolutely necessary I can start off with a fresh copy of Windows and restore all my data, though it would be a hassle. Any thoughts on what might be wrong or what I can try? My computer was purchased just this June, so the hard drive should still be pretty new.