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Retrieve and reformat
Let me start by apologizing if this is the wrong area to post this. It seemed like the closest to my issue:
My computer was originally Windows 7, upgraded for free to 10 during their upgrade campaign. I suspect I got a virus that my protection couldn't handle. My system got pretty slow over a few days. When I restarted the computer to try to reset memory and all that, it got through the bios boot up, then went to a black screen with no prompt. It did this on multiple restarts. There was always a cursor for about half a second on the black screen, but no prompt. My friend said he thought Windows wasn't even beginning the boot process because control alt delete instantly caused a full restart from this black screen.
I tried making a Windows 10 boot device on a thumb drive, but i couldn't figure out how to get the computer to recognise it as a boot device.
I replaced my optical drive, which was broken long ago by a curious 1- year old, so i could try my windows 7 install disc. Even with the optical drive as the first boot device, it still wouldn't load windows or the original installation menu.
After coming home from work one day, the curious now-2-year-old had turned the power on at some point and it was magically on the desktop! However the keyboard wasn't working, for whatever reason. I ran virus scan with no results and restarted again, unfortunately before i thought to verify my documents were sufficiently backed up on my external hard drive.
I'm back to the no boot up situation, although now control alt delete doesn't restart the computer.
To try to rescue my files that are not backed up (pretty much only text documents) before reformatting, I swapped the inaccessible windows 10 hard drive into a freshly installed Windows 7 computer. On the windows 7 computer, i can open the w10 hard drive and view and copy almost all the files in the drive EXCEPT for the Users folder and everything in it (which includes the Documents folder with the only files that really matter to me). I tried copying the entire users folder to the w7 hard drive as well as my external. Both got a little way in, successfully copying garbage files and folders with settings and whatnot (the stuff i don't need). But only a little way into the copying, progress would just stop. They busy copying animation still going, but not actually making any progress.
Sorry for being so long-winded, I just wanted to be thorough. Any help is greatly appreciated!
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