Once you reboot computer you can try to use the system restore to bring back system files that may be important to you.  This is great because it will do this without interrupting your other files that are already running (such as documents).  You can also try using the “Last known good configuration” setting to try and bring up the last set of drivers and registry settings that you were using.  If neither of these work then you should promptly put your computer into safe mode until you can figure out what to do to fix the problem.

One of the next things you can try in Windows recovery is to disable any devices that may be hindering the operating system.  You can also restore any running system devices that may be necessary to get it working properly.  The way you can do this is by going into the Device Manager and messing with the settings a little bit.  Here you can either add or remove programs that will help your system to run smoother.

If things are still not working then you can try the startup repair to try to fix the damaged files and get the most out of your windows recovery.  This startup repair device is located on the Windows Installation disc.  If this still doesn’t work, you may need to just reinstall Windows completely.  In this case, you will probably lose all of the files you were trying to recover.

The best way to ensure that you can get a complete Windows system recovery is to make sure that you have all of your files and documents saved on an external hard drive somewhere.  That way, even if your computer crashes you will still have a copy of your important data so you don’t have to go through the frustration and anxiety of completely losing it all.

The FIXMBR website has additional information that you might find useful.

My favorite recovery disk uses the Slax Linux operating system.  I simply remaster the disk using easy to load utility modules that contain the tools that I like to use for recovering files or operating systems.  Likewise DOS has as many tools available so that you can accomplish the same tasks using DOS utilities.  However the fastest recovery uses imaging tools that can perform a complete system recovery in a few minutes.

There are two imaging tools that I prefer.  The first is North Ghost and the second is a free Open Source utility called Partimage.  Partimage is a Linux tool that can image and restore both FAT32 and NTFS files systems.  Partimage is fast and is a clone of Norton Ghost.  I use Norton Ghost to daily to restore 35 computers in a high school lab.  The high school students have complete admin rights to the computers so that they can complete labs that require them to change the software configuration.  Each morning I am able to refresh the operating systems by restoring using and image on a DOS operating system.  DOS is fast and it only takes about 10 minutes to restore all 35 computers.  I can also restore computers during class if needed to provide a fresh known working configuration.  This helps me keep the computers available for the students 24/7/365 with about 99.9% availability.  I occasionally have a power supply or hard drive failure that takes about 5 minutes to fix.

Sometimes my students ask me why we need to learn DOS.  I tell them that Windows is the problem and DOS can be a great solution.

The FIXMBR website has additional information that you might find useful.