Windows 7 My problems started with BSOD!! Please Advise

[Lethal8108]

This mess started after I had been playing Sims 2. The computer froze and BSOD popped up, in disbelief I didn't get any of the info from BSOD. I do remember it dumping memory or something.

After the shutdown/restart Windows failed to load/start. After some investigation and a similar issue happening before I discovered that the C: was somehow changed in the registry to a different drive letter, do not remember which. Using information of a MS KB article I editted the registry, changing the drive letters around as per the article's instruction.

After a successful boot, by this I mean Windows started and took me to the login/welcome screen. There I found that of 3 profiles; 1 admin and 2 standard, I could only log into one of each. The admin profile ran extremely slow and the standard profile, which rarely gets used ran fine. I could not get into the 3rd profile, it kept taking me to a "temporary" profile I can only guess because it did not have any of the personal settings that I had used in the original three.

The decision was made to start backing up personal stuff and do a "restore to factory settings." After the "are you sures," Recovery had almost completed when I received a message saying that it could not continue.

Now there is no Windows installation for which to recover. The D: drive which was a recovery drive/image is no longer there and is the CD/DVD drive now.

To make matters worse, I thought I might perform a fresh install of WinXP and then once that was up and running use my Win7 disk to perform a fresh install of Win7.

This seem to further complicate things, as now what was once a 250GB HDD now shows up as a 59GB drive. I am not certain, but the drives have somehow got partitioned.

After BIOS, I get the bootmgr missing error CRTL,ALT,DEL to restart message.

Please assist in anyway you can. I am a jack of all trades so to say, but a master of none. Please use laymans term, as I may understand some of "tech speak," but not all.

The computer is an HP G71, had Win7x64, 4GB RAM, any other info you need will have to come from the BIOS as I dont have much access to anything else.

---edit---

Computer will not boot from Win7 installation disc. Same bootmgr error as before. I have access to a very limited command prompt through use of a repair disc that would normally give options to recover if there was something to recover.

 

[Saltgrass]

I suppose I am a little confused about your situation. You can boot to a Recovery CD but not an install DVD? Is this a Windows 7 Recovery CD or something else?

When you try to boot to the install DVD, do you get the "Hit key to boot to DVD"? Is there an F key to choose a boot device?

 

[Lethal8108]

I suppose I am a little confused about your situation. You can boot to a Recovery CD but not an install DVD? Is this a Windows 7 Recovery CD or something else?

When you try to boot to the install DVD, do you get the "Hit key to boot to DVD"? Is there an F key to choose a boot device?

To clear things up a little:

1. I never recieved a Windows Installation Disc when I bought the computer. However, I was able to make recovery disc...you know those ones it tells you that you can only make 1 copy of.

2. I also had created a disc through a download from Microsoft that would load only the Recovery Manager options.

3. For sometime now my Internal CD/DVD drive will not read DVDs, however it reads CDs fine.

4. The Recovery disc are DVDs and the Recovery Manager boot disc is a CD.

5. After trying all the things in the original post, I borrowed a friend's copy of Windows and used my product key off the laptop. No piracy took place. Instead of trying to boot off the Internal CD/DVD drive, I used an external DVD drive to boot, load, and re-install Windows.

Works fine now, but I have a 59 GB partition that I am not able to get rid of. I have called that Drive Z: and will simply use it for storage, though its not as clean as just having the physical space on the C:.

Thanks for your responses! As off writing this, my starting problem sounded like something that would be caused by the rootkit infection Microsoft released information about today.