What I meant was when you reinstalled Windows the last time - which was the
Clean Reinstall Windows 7, correct? - did you unplug the hard drive? This is important.
Let us see a screenshot of
Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image as something may be obvious like your Boot Manager being on the hard drive.
The next thing I would do is try running HP Diagnostics by tapping the ESC key at boot to choose Diagnostics from the menu.
If Diagnostics won't run or casts doubt on your hard drive then test your hard drive using the maker's
HD Diagnostic extended CD scan. You can look on the hard drive to see who made it. Follow that up with a full
Disk Check .
Please take the time now to look over the steps for a
Clean Reinstall Windows 7 to compare the perfect install compiled there with the one you actually did. A Clean Reinstall should result in a vastly better install than Factory Recovery, not with problems like you experienced. The steps include everything that works best in tens of thousands of installs we've directly helped with here. It has been used by 1.5 million consumers who haven't had a single complaint.
When you tell me you don't even have the Optional Updates installed then I can see you have serious deficiencies in your install, which may be best remedied by wiping the tested hard drive with
Diskpart Clean Command then following the steps for a
Clean Reinstall Windows 7.
You can also try running
HP System Recovery to see if it will still run and resolve the problem, then
Clean Up Factory Bloatware which will regain some performance lost to the bloatware and problematic utilities that duplicate better versions built into Win7.
If Recovery will not run from its hotkey after the reinstall you did, then you can use the Recovery disks which should have been made first, or try to
Boot Recovery Partition using EasyBCD.
If Recovery cannot be made to run and you want to do a
Clean Reinstall Windows 7 anyway, then delete all partitions during the reinstall to get it cleanest.
