tried to install old game, now windows 8 won't boot up

Hello majorgeeks!

When I turn on my laptop, I get the following message right away:

"Your PC needs to be repaired. The boot configuration data file doesn't contain valid information for an operating system.

File: \BCD

Error code: 0xc0000098

You'll need to use the recovery tools on your installation media. If you don't have any installation media, contact your system administrator or PC manufacturer."

The only thing that I think could have caused this was the game(released in 2010, and Japanese) that I tried to install the previous day; the installation got stuck part way through, so I gave up. I also installed a Japanese language pack afterwards, but wasn't bothered to try installing the game again. Anyway the laptop was fine for the rest of the day, but when I turned it on this morning, I got the above message.

Windows 8 was pre installed on my laptop, so I didn't have the installation disc/recovery tools. Pressing escape on this screen gives me a few options, but I don't think any of them will enable me to boot up. There was the option to run a diagnostics tool, which I ran, and it found no problems with any of the hardware at least.

I tried calling the manufacturer(DELL) and they said the problem was most likely caused by the game being incompatible with windows 8. Then they said that I could probably get it fixed if I pay a crap load of money for some software warranty plan(which I would rather not do).

Does anyone have any advice for this? There are some really important files that I hadn't yet backed up, and I would at least like to rescue them...

 

Most new laptops come with a recovery partition installed. Shutdown and restart your laptop and follow the brief instructions that quickly appear at the bottom of your screen as the laptop is starting up.

 

Most older games will now require VM or a copy of a dual boot of XP.

Windows vista,7,8 does not seem to get a long with older games.especially with 64bit windows.

 

If I press F12 right after turning the computer on and before the error message appears, then "F2 setup" and "F12 boot options" show up at the bottom. But I've already tried these, and none of the menus that they take me to seem to have any repair/recovery options. I don't even know if I would be able to run a CD, since I can't find the option for that either...

On my old laptop(which had Windows XP), in the boot options I could change the order in which it booted things; this way I was able to change the order so that even if the computer wouldn't boot up, it would boot from the disk drive first, which enabled me to run the installation disk and repair the computer... But with my current laptop, I don't know how/if I could make it boot from an installation disk(not that I have one for windows 8 anyway).

By the way, my laptop is a DELL Inspiron 15R 5520, and I got it about 4 months ago.

 

See if anything in here helps: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/2843-automatic-repair-run-windows-8-a.html

 

Okay, I downloaded ultimate boot CD and burned it to a disk, in an attempt to recover my important files. I managed to boot from the disk, but I'm not sure which of the tools I should use... I tried running parted magic, but it stopped after this point:

LZMA data is corrupt

--system halted


Can anyone give me advice on the nature of this error, and which tools I might need to run to boot up properly?

 

Also, I found something called Windows 8 recovery disk, which can be downloaded here:

http://windowsreinstall.com/win8/windows_8_recovery_disk_download.htm#.Uai8n0BQHpp

I'm considering trying it, but I'm not sure if it is legit/safe though...

 

Okay, I've received the Windows 8 recovery media from DELL, and am trying to reinstall it from scratch, following these instructions http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-8/clean-install, but I get stuck at the "where do you want to install Windows?" part; I get a list of the Drive 0 partitions, and at the bottom an error that says "Windows can't be installed on drive 0 partition 1". Clicking it gives me the following details:

Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT partition style.

Windows cannot be installed to this hard disk space. Windows must be installed to a partition formatted as NTFS.

Windows cannot be installed to this hard disk space. The partition is an EFI system partition (ESP)

Since I'm hardly an expert on computers, I really have no idea what it's asking me to do, or how to do it, or what any of these things that it's mentioned even are... I'm starting to worry that I might not even be able to reinstall from scratch. PLEASE HELP