Windows 7 will not boot.

I have a gateway laptop that will not boot even in safe mode. It almost acts like the hard drive is bad but all I did was restart the computer and then it would not boot. I can boot from the CD so I have tried to create different ISO boot CDs but nothing so far has worked. This included Norton Recovery tools, but it seemed like it could not access the C drive. Unless their is an issue with 64 bit. I ran the memory utility and that came back good.

Windows 7 came OEM installed and I do not have a disk. I hit Alt F10 to access the gateway recovery management and selected restore operating system and retain use data, but it came back saying there was no user files. Again it is like there is a problem with the drive. Yet this program came up from the drive. Also tried window repair but it just hangs up.

Any suggestion on how to proceed would be appreciated.

 

Well I left windows repair run all night and by some miracle it fixed the problem. I now have 3 questions:

1) Is there a proper procedure when restarting ones computer so this does not happen again.

2) I looked at my restore points and I only have 1 and 10GB allocated. How does one tell how much space each restore point takes up

3) In case this did not work or my hard drive had died. What program are available to backup everything such that I can restore and get my windows back and all the programs and files and all the programs work without reinstalling

 

An imaging program like Acronis True Image. This is the only one I use so I'm not sure how the others work.
I make an image every few months so that if something goes wring, I can restore one of the images and only have a month or two of updates to install. I generally burn to DVD for the first set and after that, I store other images on an external hard drive.

I also hope that you went into the Program menu, found Gateway, clicked on Gateway Recovery Management and burned "Create Factory Default Disc" so you have something to use in the meantime.

 

Good as Acronis is, with Win 7 you do not need any third party tools to completely backup your computer as the capability is already built in. Type backup into the Search box and Backup and Restore should appear in the choices above. Using Create System Image you can back up to an external drive or to DVDs or even to another partition on your main drive, though that isn't a great idea as if you lose the drive you lose your backup too.