Boot up problem with Win 7 gets stuck

Medion PC – only 6 months old

1TB hard drive with 100 MB partition for memory
6GB RAM CPU 3GHz Windows 7 Home Premium

Please don’t be mislead by the extent of my investigations into this problem – I am far from a techie and gleaned all these methods off the net
So it may be that I am not applying them correctly or do not understand them right. I am probably out of my depth!

This was working absolutely fine until I did a routine restart and it failed to reboot properly.
Instead it booted with the message "reboot and select proper boot device – or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key".

CTRL, ALT and DEL had no effect.
I did a hard reboot from here with exactly the same result.
I repeated the process this time tapping the "delete" key which gave me access to the Windows logo and the message that I could press F2 for the BIOS or F8 for the BOOT order - both of these were fine and I swapped the BOOT order to DVD 1st and did another hard boot which landed me back at the first screen above.
I then tried booting up with a boot disc for Win 7 and then a system rescue disc, but both only took me as far as the original screen message outlined at the beginning – they failed to initiate a system reboot.

This time though CTRL, ALT and DELETE took me to the Windows 7 repair screen, giving me the various options for repair.
Start-up repair failed with the message "cannot repair - try system disc"
System repair failed also with the message "select OS before using this option."
System image recovery failed with the message "cannot find System Image Backup."
Windows Memory Diagnostic failed to run with the message unable to run

Command Prompt worked but a variety of commands failed to run including specific Boot commands and Bootrec/FixMbr commands and also other specific Bootrec / commands.
Unfortunately none of these worked, and in one case the program requested the installation discs which I never had.
In desperation I took a crash course in Puppy Linux and tried both Slacko and Lupo Linux but very worryingly neither could "see"
my hard drive and neither was the least help in booting the drive.

A further hard boot took me to a section of the repair module, asking me to select a keyboard language. I did, then System Recovery Options asked me to choose an OS, but none was shown.
I clicked 'next' and the option was to "load drivers" - clicking this brought up "load installation media" but as were none available we reached stalemate and I had to cancel.
The only option left was to click 'next' which gave me "windows cannot find a system image on this computer”. “Attach backup hard drive or final DVD of backup set..."
As these are not available, again the only option is to 'cancel'.
The next available option is "Select system image backup" but predictably this requests "select location of System Image Backup"... again not available so the only option is to cancel.

Back to DOS prompt:
try the following command to rebuild your BCD:
bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd
This produced the response – “The total number of Windows installations found was 0”
Next I tried the more fundamental:
bcdedit /export C:\BCD_Backup
c:
cd boot
attrib bcd -s -h –r
ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
bootrec /RebuildBcd
This produced exactly the same result – no windows installations found. Either Windows has been somehow removed from the HDD or the program is not reading it properly as it claims to be?
I seem to be going round in very large circles

Am I right in presuming that my HDD has crashed beyond redemption - well unless I remove it and try hooking it up physically?

It is not really about data recovery - nearly all of the data is backed up, and in any event it is a nearly new drive with not much on it.
But I am disappointed - I had hoped that with Puppy I would be able to recover data if that had been a problem.
But surely a new drive shouldn't have crashed like this? What makes a HDD crash like this?
I will contact the company I got it from - is it reasonable to expect them to replace it for free?

Anyone got any other suggestions before I disembowel my PC? I've never done this before so....

 

Open up the computer and move the SATA cable from the hard drive to a different port on the motherboard. This worked for someone. Either the SATA cable was loose or the port went bad on the motherboard.