System Specs first:

-Windows XP Pro (Installed First), and Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit.
Installed on same HDD, separate partitions. Each partition has plenty of free space.
- Intel Core 2 duo E6700 3.2 GHZ (Overclocked by computer merchant, OverdrivePC)
- P5N32-SLI-SE-Deluxe (custom BIOS by OverdrivePC?)
American Megatrends Inc. ver. 0501 Date: 9/11/2006
- 2 GB DDR2 memory at 400 mhz.
- 8800 GTS 640MB
- Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music 64-bit (I think it's Xtreme Music, not sure)

Last night, I shut down vista. Vista seemed to take a little longer than normal to shut down. I had turned the monitor off, and the computer had been running for a couple of minutes (in the process of shutting down). When I turned the monitor back on, vista was saying: "Windows is shutting down", or something like that. A few seconds later vista promptly shut down. It is my assumption that vista had been configuring updates (my computer was on for a few days, I think I had downloaded a few automatic updates since then).

The next afternoon when I get home from college, I boot up the computer, get a drink of tea, and press enter on the keyboard to select the option of booting up vista (and then turn my monitor on). After the green loading bar thingy scrolled a few times, chkdsk comes up and says it's recommended that my disk be checked for errors. Next thing I know, I see several deletion notices saying stuff about corrupt files and IIRC bad sectors. Chkdsk finishes doing whatever scary stuff it did and restarted my computer. I chose to boot into vista again (or, so I thought would happen). Vista does its green bar thingy and then goes to a blank screen. The windows logo never loads, but I get a blank screen with a white mouse pointer again. The resolution of the screen is what I set it to, so apparently the video drivers loaded properly as well. My keyboard turned on (or, lit up), and so did my mouse. Ctrl+Alt+Del did nothing. All I could do was move my mouse. I tried booting into safemode with networking. Again, the same thing (albeit a lower resolution).

Fearing another HD failure (I had previously lost all the data on an external "backup" western digital "my book" Hard drive after two months of operation), I booted up to XP Pro to see if I could recover any data. EVERTHING WAS WORKING PERFECTLY! All my data was intact. I went ahead and backed up some of the important stuff on my HD anyway. Then, I looked online for solutions. I found that many people were having problems similar to mine, but I've not found any sound solutions yet.

So, after typing the abve information, I decide to check the partition with windows vista on it. 32 gigabytes of HD space were freed up! What does this mean? Does Vista see HD space differently than XP (before I was using vista to look at HD space, now I'm using XP PRO)? Is my Hard drive really failing? I previously had roughly 100 GB of free space out of the 194 GB total for the partion (when I say roughly, the free space would fluctuate between 99.1 GB and 102 GB (maybe 103 or 104)). The total space of the drive did not fluctuate nor change after chkdsk. I suspected it was just the page file because I play some intensive games that use more memory than I have RAM, but that may not have been the case.

I looked in my vista partition.
Everything under the windows folder:

Size: 12.4 GB (13,387,142,917 bytes)
Size on Disk: 12.5 GB (13,485,617,152 bytes)
Contains: 57,702 Files, 11,196 Folders

Is this the normal amount of data one would find on an OS like mine? I looked at some of the games I frequently played, and their sizes seem intact. Maybe it's just the way XP sees free space that showed the drive as having more free space.

Edit: When I was checking the windows folder, I heard odd noises. Sounded like a plastic wheel that spun too fast and vibrated. When checked the program files directory, I heard very little of this noise. I haven't heard this noise at all while using the XP Pro partition.

Yes, I believe it does....

No luck so far. I tried using the installation disk: I've tried using a restore point but there were no restore points to go back to. Automatic startup repair detected nothing! The diagnostics said everything was fine.

I don't want to have to lose a bunch of data and spend days getting everything back to the way I wanted to. It would be such a shame to have to reinstall vista all over again (would it even work, could it be validated again, or would M$ say that my copy was in use?). It may be something I could fix by accessing vista files from XP. Is there any known way to fix this, other than just reinstalling vista?

Edit: Oh, and there was no checkbox saying to display restore points older than 5 days. I had read in a topic about someone who had a problem like mine.