Wondering if a malicious code did this...

The other day my computer stopped booting up but instead showed a dialog box ("Interactive logon process initialization has failed") but after googleling it on my iphone many others had this same problem. None of the suggested fixes worked.

So I went to repair it with the Win7 disc but suddenly my computer could no longer read my disc drive, even though I could hear the disc spinning and see the light flashing. So on the same day I could neither boot up nor repair. I tried F8 for options to repair (it found nothing to repair) and system restore (repeatedly said restore failed).

Luckily, I still had Win7 on an old hard drive and am using it to boot up, and with the original drive now as a slave I am back in business with access to all my programs.

Device Manager shows no problems with the disc drive. Googled that too and none of the suggested fixes for this worked either including Microsoft's page to delete upper and lower filters using regedit. Samsung's firmware updates did not work, as well as uninstalling the device and rebooting. The problem seems to be in software as the mechanical part of the drive is working.

Sure seems coincidental that suddenly my startup files and disc drive goes down together leaving me with no way to repair. Still waiting on my new disc drive from Amazon as I've run out of fixes to attempt. At least a basic dvd drive is cheap, but you sure are helpless without it. I'm new to my neighborhood so I can't exactly go next door and ask, "Excuse me, can I borrow a cup of sugar and your disc drive?"

From now on I'm keeping a cloned hard drive handy. Acronis cloner is free and works great.

I have another question for the learned experts here:

With my master/slave setup I can access my original hard drive to save pictures and documents . What I can't figure out is how to salvage such things as my bookmarks on both IE and Firefox. I use Firefox for youtube vids as it blocks those annoying commercials before it lets you see the video. I won't watch youtube without it. In fact, I keep Flash Shockwave disabled on IE.

Anyone know where to find these files so I can import them into a new Win7 install?

Pauly said:

If your optical drive is toast you also have the option of booting recovery media from USB
Some good info here
Troubleshooting Windows 7 Failure to Boot
USB Windows 7 Installation Key Drive - Create

Setting up the USB flash drive with the iso file was easy and worked great. The Microsoft tool made it quick and easy. Of course, normally I just pop in my Windows disc to repair or reinstall, but since I could not do that with my disc drive kaput, this was the perfect solution.

I'll keep the bootable USB drive around for any future problems but I'm still going to periodically clone my hard drive to a spare. It's so easy I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier. It backs up my entire system without the hassle of burning, labeling, and storing all those dvds. If a drive goes bad or gets infected I can just move the sata cable over to the clone.