windows explorer cannot find my drives

Ive encountered an odd problem that is on the verge of driving me insane. I crashed last night and upon rebooting, I tried to access my c:\. So i ran windows explorer, and all i got was a flashlight icon looking for my drives (have C:\, D:\(HDD), E:\(cd rom) F:\(DVD) and found nothing until it eventually crashed. I rebooted, left my comp. off for a while, and came back to the same problem. I figured maybe it was a virus.. so i ran my virus checkers (had to access them through Command prompt) and it found nothing. However, when i ran the virus scanners, obviously they could see my drives with no problem, and so could command prompt. Also, when i am in internet explorer, and i manually type in a URL and hit enter, nothing happens. I can only browse pages Via links from bookmarks, so i had to go to google bookmark which eventually led me here. And I have no clue what to do at this point




-Botch

 

I agree the drives have to be still there and working. Otherwise boot.ini couldn't have found the boot partition to load the OS.

Not sure exactly what would have caused this mess but a couple of things to try. May help. Can't hurt. And will rule out some things if they don't help.

start~run~c:\ and see if it opens Windows Explorer and pointing to the C: drive.

start~run~sfc /scannow to repair/replace any damaged system files. If that won't run, try
start~run~c:\windows\system32\sfc /scannow

start~run~cmd and then chkdsk c: /r and answer Yes to running it at next boot then reboot. And as above, start~run~c:\windows\system32\cmd if it can't find just the exe file since your environment settings may have gotten messed up too. Easy enough to fix but only after the main issues are corrected.