New
#1320
Success!!! In case this helps others, here's the steps I took to recover:
1. Borrowed a friends drive reader and backed up the personal files on my hard drive
2. Ran check disk on my hard drive with auto repair (found some bad clusters which probably took out some OS files and caused the crash)
3. Got a copy of the a W7 install disk from a friend and used it as a boot disk. This brought up the option to repair the existing installation (which failed), then the option to do a system restore (which succeeded).
I haven't been through every file and program to be sure it all works, but it was great joy when I saw my desktop reappear and so far everything has been working fine. My next step is to create a back-up to my back-up (in case it crashes during back-up again) and to create a disk image as well. Many thanks for the help and moral support I found here. I'll definitely come back looking for answers in the future.