HP Pavilion cannot boot up

I have an HP pavilion I think its a dv4 but not sure. The model number is 20C0-299WM. At first the computer stopped recognizing the CD reader/writer. And now it stopped recognizing the second partition on the hard drive. So now I can't recover windows 7 because the 2nd partition had the recovery files OK on it. Now I can't even recover through the CD drive. I heard there is a way to put the windows files on a USB drive and boot and recover from the USB. Is this true? Or is there some other way I can do this? I have a lot of very important files on my comp. If anyone could help me out I would ready appreciate it. Thank you for your time.

 

What exactly do you see on screen when you try to boot this computer? Does it boot into Win7?

Usually, doing a recovery from the recovery partition wipes all files and restores to factory setting which doesn't sound like what you want to do.