Yeah... my laptop stopped booting correctly a couple of days ago. I diagnosed the problem with Google and it appears to be a problem with the hard drive.

I was able to boot Linux from a CD, and I found 3 hard drive partitions. One was DellRestore (which I plan to use at some point, but that erases all files), the second was DellUtility, which has Dell stuff in it, and the third was unable to mount, because it couldn't determine the file system.

Now this seems to point to corruption. Is there a good program I can use (on Linux, of course) that will try to restore data from my hard drive?

I'd imagine...

What I used to do for people is I'd go recovery their hard drives. The main thing I would do is pop in a linux live cd and mount their file systems and send it to another harddrive. Seeing as your filesystem won't mount I'm not sure what to tell you.

Well, I just now used Testdisk to restore the boot sector using the built-in backup and now I can mount it. The files and such seem to be there, however I can't boot Windows yet. It's a good start, though!

Don't bother trying to get it back to a bootable state. Just back up your data files. Then do a chkdisk/fsck asap including a surface scan. It is quite possible you have bad sectors and/or a dying drive. Then either reformat (if the chkdisk/fsck returns no bad sectors) or replace it (bad sectors == dying drive, replace it)

I was planning on backing it up anyway. I'm doing that now...

Side note: My hard drive has 13337 folders on it.

It's a sign. The drive died right before you could make a single new folder, because it is the 1337357 drive evar.

After you back up your files (which you should do right away), I think it would still be worth it to see if you could get it booting again. It would save you a lot of hassle, getting everything the way you want it when you reinstall and such.

In the long run it is worth it to re-install. If anything it will give the system a fresh start. It will also at least ensure that there aren't any corrupted files - which he obviously has at the moment.

Pretty sure it's corrupted Master Boot Record or something like that... the files themselves don't seem all that bad.

Still, better safe than sorry if the drive is indeed failing.

Especially since it only takes at most an hour to know for certain whether or not there are bad sectors on the drive

Well, I was able to fix Dell Restore and use that to restore the system to how it was when manufactured. Then I used Linux to delete all files on C:\ and replace with my backup. The laptop is working fine (I'm posting from it right now) but as a side-effect from the backup/restore, all hidden files are now unhidden, and some Word documents got the first two characters of their name replaced with ~$. I'll see if there's anything I can do about the hidden files issue.

I remember something from my old laptop with the same ~$ issue only effecting word documents. I seem to remember thinking that it was a normally hidden file that went along with every word document or something...

Your documents have not been replaced. Word makes a temporary version of open documents that replaces the first two characters of the name with those two characters and hides the file. When you copied over the data, you just unhide those temporary files. They're supposed to get erased when you save or Word quits, but occasionally that doesn't happen.

Okay, I suppose I'll delete them then. Thanks.