My windows 7 installation was destroyed after a windows live update. I still don’t know why it hosed my system but it would not boot and we tried many different utilities to attempt to recover it.
After my windows 7 fatally crashed I bought a new hard drive, popped it in and completely reinstalled my O.S.
I set my BIOS to boot from the new drive and can access all of my old files from my old drive.
I found reinstalling my software time consuming, but not complicated.It still took me staying up all night to get everything back the way I need it.
I downloaded the NVIDIA drivers for my OEM G-Force 310 graphics card and got my dual monitors set up.
Fortunately, most of my software is also on my laptop so I was able to retrieve my serial numbers using Belarc Advisor. All of my Adobe software product keys are safely stored on the Adobe website. My downloaded program executable files were still safe and I have all of the product keys (from programs I purchased online) in emails that are saved on my laptop It’s a good thing too! Nero could not find my account information so without that original email I would not have been able to download my Nero 12 suite that I paid for.