Startup Repair Infinite Loop Recovery

Yes I am. I can see the Desktop Folder but there's nothing inside it. And there is no My Documents or Documents Folder inside the User(s) Folder. I'm really depressed now. I was hoping they were hidden somehow but I couldn't see them with knoppix either.

At least, you are giving me some hope, Thanks.

I've never tried Recuva, just DiskDigger. I'll let you know what happens but thank you for everything, really.

After I follow the steps it takes me to a black screen hitch a cursor and nothing else, wtf help

I have the same problem, I get the black screen also, Im trying to redo the steps again, hoping that I will not get it this time, but just in case, please post help. Thank you

After a week of thrashing around with first replacing the old hard drive on our office Dell PC, and now being confronted with an infinite loop on the notebook I was using as a backup while I wrestled with the PC ... I can't express how happy I am to find this site! Most of the hard-core sites wander off into unintelligible (to me) suggestions that make my eyes cross. Thank you thank you thank you for this clearly worded and easy-to-follow procedure!

I let startup repair do its little dance for two days, then finally opened up the dratted notebook last night, popped out the hard drive and copied most of the vital, easily seen files onto a usb thumb drive with a SATA-USB adapter. So I've got most of the important stuff, but I'm convinced there's a backup file for our invoicing program on there that would save me a lot of hassle in having to re-number and track down all the shipping docs that went out the day the sucker died on me. Plus, it'd be nice not to have to buy a second new hard drive for the notebook if I don't absolutely need to ...

Anyway. Everything went great with the tutorial until step 12. I initiated the copy to mybackup, but it stalled on copying the SYSTEM file. So I'm stuck here:

E:\Windows\System32\config>copy *.* mybackup
BCD-Template
COMPONENTS
DEFAULT
SAM
SECURITY
//It hung here for a while, then finally spit out:
The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.
SYSTEM

6 file<s> copied.

I tried it a second time, telling it to copy over the prior files that were copied, just because, hey, why not? But still no dice. Does this mean there's definitely something irreparably toasted on the HD and I should give up and just start with the replace/reinstall, or is there something else I can try??

OK, so I'm clearly not the patient type ...

I reread the tutorial and realized/remembered that step 12 was just to create the backup in case the whole maneuver didn't work, so figuring that the worst that could happen was that I'd lose some data I couldn't access anyway, I went ahead and moved on to replacing the reg hive files with the backup.

Rebooting took forever, but it did eventually boot into Windows. And though it was super sluggish at first, it now appears to be working pretty well (although I haven't restarted again yet). I didn't manage to salvage the backup invoice-database file I was looking for, but I'm not sure it even managed to make one at the relevant point anyway, and I only lost a few documents all told.

Just thought I'd leave an update and thank Dzomlija again for the great tutorial!

On Step 13, my Default, Sam, and Security files are all at the correct 262,000 bytes.
However, my Software and System files are also 262,000 bytes.
How do I correct them to the appropriate amounts?