Norton Utilities 16 Speed Disk failed and now Windows 7 will not load. Windows 7 did load enough to run its Startup Repair process, but that failed to fix the problem. It then gave me several system recovery options which didn't work either. System Restore didn't work because it couldn't find any restore points. There was no system image to recover. I can only get into the Command Prompt, but I don't know what I can do here to salvage anything. I'm pretty sure I will have to reinstall Windows 7 and all other applications, but I'm hoping that someone will have some easier solution. For example, can I restart Speed Disk so that it can finish the defragmentation? Or can I possibly rebuild the system manually from files that I can access from the Command Prompt?
The Command Prompt is showing the current directory as X:\windows\system32. (I don't recall there being an X: drive before, so I presume it was created by Speed Disk.) The DIR command shows the sub-directories that I would expect in this directory. DIR C: shows only 5 directories, but they do include WINDOWS, USERS, and PROGRAM FILES. So, could I copy files from X: to C: in order to rebuild the system enough for it to load completely?
It doesn't really matter to me why Speed Disk failed, but for those who are curious, here is what I know: I set Speed Disk to do a complete defragmentation of the only hard drive but checked the option to run at the next time the system booted. Then I told Windows to Restart. Speed Disk did start up with white text on a black screen. It performed various tasks to 100% and then started showing the percent completed of the defragmentation process. Because I knew this would take a long time, I went away and did other things. About 20 or 30 minutes later, I came back to check on the progress and found that the system seemed to be in sleep mode. The only thing I could do to wake it up was to lightly press the power button and the computer sounded as though it did start running again but the monitor remained blank and nothing happened when I tried to use the mouse and keyboard. So, I just let it run some more. When I next checked, the system was on but it was quiet and I couldn't hear any disk activity. In the hope that it was still working on the defrag, I just let it go overnight. This morning it was in the same state, so I concluded it was inactive. I pressed the power button lightly to bring it out of sleep mode but nothing happened. So, I powered down and then powered back up. The system went through the normal boot process and started to load Windows at which point it said that Windows failed to load and it would attempt a Startup Repair.