Slightly off-topic

[delinquent]

I'm downloading Windows 8 again, but in order to install it I need to sort one of my hard drives out. Basically, for a short time I used Bitlocker, and after getting sick of it I decided to unencrypt my drives. One of them errored about 60% through, and running chkdsk failed to sort out any issues. I can access all my files on it, but it's gonna be a pisstake job to copy them all over to another drive, as my r/w speeds leave something to be desired. I tried accessing the drive in ubuntu, with no success. Anyone got any ideas?

[Word]

A while ago I had to reinstall windows (vista) because the C drive wasn't recognized anymore (some driver error I suppose). I just didn't format it when I was asked to do so. All my files are still there. If you're lucky you have a disc with all the driver backups and can just try that instead (or do what is described here).

[delinquent]

Nono, the drive is still recogised, and functions normally apart from the error message. The issue is that I won't be able to access that drive from anything other than my current build of win7. To all other systems, including other installs of windows, the drive will appear corrupted or simply not appear at all. It's not a question of drivers, more of encryption.

[/dev/null]

you need to wipe all of the partitions off the drive and make new ones.
my advice is to use any of the number of linux livecds, and run fdisk or cfdisk on the drive (if you only have one itll probably be /dev/sda possibly /dev/hda)

[delinquent]

Oh, cheers, that's close enough to what I did.