Unkown Hard Error

My friend has recently run into a problem with their laptop. They were finding their computer to be a little slow, so left it to defrag overnight. It onlt reached about 60% when they woke up the next day and so they stoppped it and went on for the day doing whatever. Later that day they were scanning for viruses or something when they suddenly had to reboot because the computer locked up. The computer wouldn't reboot, so they took the battery out to turn it off. After turning it back on later they couldn't load windows.

A blue screen appears that says something like: Stop: c0000221 Unknown Hard Error \ System root \ System32 \ ntdll.dll

We can't even boot into safe mode, same error occurs. Can't load a previous working copy either, it just resets after trying to load windows.

Tried using the recovery console, after typing '1' to select the copy of windows to use (the only option) the computer just stops (or seems to).

They don't want to lose the information on their computer. What can be done to fix this?

Thanks.

 

if they have an install disk for their operating system and their product key they could try doing an over install which leave the non-system files(music pictures etc.) and replaces the windows infrastructure.

 

You mean installing windows again isn't like starting fresh? It will keep everything that was previously on the computer? Because that's pretty much the solution I was looking for.

 

right, when you're installing you select the existing partition and it will ask if you want to use the current file system or to format you opt to use the file system that is already in place.