[John Rogers]

Well the stuff on there needs to get off. I used Wondershare Recovery software and the free version works great. If the hardware can be seen with or without the OS and partition information. It will take a long, very long time of partition information is corrupted as the program reads the disk physical information.

On your way home stop at Best Buy, Costco or any other place that will sell you an external hard drive and backup the "C" drive immediately. The latest drive I bought had data recovery and backup software included, it was a Seagate 1TB.

Before that, try a start in safe mode and run chkdsk.exe as noted above. See what it sez?

That is a pretty good cat bed. Ours live 7 or 8 years due to being "hunters" and usually just go off to die and we get a new one or two.