Complete Meltdown After Hiding User Folder

Hi thunper427 and welcome to the Forum. The clean Factory Reinstall Tutorial is probably your best bet at the moment. You will be able to perform a Repair Install which should fix your problems and leave your data intact. (Caution: back up all your data anyway) Now, beyond that, manufactures no longer supply Windows DVD's with new systems. However, they do provide a program on your computer to Create (burn) a set of Recovery DVD's that you can use to restore your system back to Factory Condition. All your data is lost with this method. This is the very first thing a person should do on purchasing a new laptop. You would use these to restore to a new hard Drive.

Secondly, there is an option at bootup (look at your manual to find what keys to hit) to restore to Factory Condition from a hidden partition already on your computer. You would use this method if the hard drive was physically ok but Windows was beyond repair. Be aware that this method also erases user data..
Good luck and keep us posted on your progress.
Cheers
JohnnyA

Back up your data documents, videos, pictures, music etc. to a external hard drive, then go to your manufacturers web site and download the drives put them on the external hard drive, then do a clean install, install drivers, updates, install programs, put data back.

Jerry

you could try downloading a windows 7 iso burn it to a disc using imgburn, creating a bootable disc
then run a repair install from that.
the iso download should match your existing OS, for instance. win7 x64 home premium

these links should help.

http://www.heidoc.net/joomla/technol...ence/microsoft

http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?showtopic=11194

Repair Install

Just do your back-ups, follow the tutorials TO THE LETTER and you'll be fine. As I mentioned earlier, we have some very excellent people in here writing some very good detailed tutorials. They've worked for literally thousands of people. If you have any questions about anything, just ask someones always here.

Creating a set of Recovery DVD's does not include copying any of your data to the DVD's. The Recovery DVD's are actually created from the hidden Recovery Partition and allow you to restore your system to Factory condition in the event of a hard drive failure. As I mentioned in my previous post, this is the FIRST THING YOU SHOULD DO!
Cheers
JohnnyA

None of this stuff seems official, it's not from a microsoft website, won't this invalidate my warranty?

Sorry, another question. I am looking at the Heidoc website and don't know which iso to download and burn. There's media refresh, old, RTM, RTM (not bootable), Home Premium x64 N RTM.... Help!

You want the appropriate Media Refresh version this has SP1 incorporated. Some early SP1 disks had problems and this replaces them. The links provided are to the official Microsoft download from Digital River.