Solved System hangs on CHKDSK, used System REFRESH. Help?

Alright, so I have my girlfriend's Win 8 HP done with a REFRESH, but it says it saves the documents, settings, etc. If this is the case, I need to find my files, if not, I have a much bigger problem with all of the files being lost, because that is the very thing I have been trying to prevent.

I have set up this post to auto-email me with a reply, so you can probably tell from that statement how urgent this is.

Usually it's under C:\Windows.old

EDIT: You should not have to do a refresh, chkdsk will take a long time to complete depending on how badly corrupted the HD is.

As for locating files, it will depend upon where you stored them or programs you used stored them. Generally most programs will save, by default, in the Documents/My Documents Folder, pictures in their Folder, videos in their Folder. Opening File Explorer then clicking This PC in the left column will show those Folders in the right pane. If the files were saved into a different Folder you can Search for it by name.

When I ran CHKDSK, it would hang at 11% for more than a couple hours. Unfortunately, at this point, I was forced to terminate power to the machine and attempt another option to get it to work properly. I tried Startup Repair, and all of the many other options provided with Win 8.1 allows you to attempt to repair it, resorting to "Refresh PC without losing your files" as the last possible option. I was able to get all of the steps completed, but when I logged into my girlfriend's account, the only things it appears to have kept are the desktop theme, lock screen, logon screen, and the Windows Store apps.... Everything else is not where it should be.

When running chkdsk and it hangs at 11% for more than couple of hours is normal, I've seen cases it would take 24hours or more to fix the problem depending on how bad the HD is corrupted.

As said above, did you check if there's a folder called Windows.old under C drive, this is where your data is moved to when doing a refresh.

I have looked in the Windows.old directory under the C drive. The directory with the username is there, but the sub-directories under that with the documents, pictures, downloads, videos.... Etc. ALL GONE.

As said already, if the drive has a large chunk of bad sectors chkdsk can take quite awhile. Sadly, if those files were on bad sectors and you've run chkdsk even partially, they may be lost for good. I always backup important files before any kind of major repair like refresh or chkdsk.

The Documents folder under the username has nothing?

Edit: What does SMART report on the drive. SpeedFan or Speccy can tell you.

Edit2: There is recovery software like this one for Seagate drives: Restore Seagate Hard Disk Data having Bad Sectors ? Seagate HDD data Recovery Software
Also Recuva: https://www.piriform.com/recuva

The key is, don't do anything with the drive until you run the software and run it on another drive.