[Hack&Lube]

Okay, I usually know what I am doing with computers but this is freaking me out because I had just spend a week doing a lot of things to my current install of windows to make me like it and I have a lot of registry tweaks and installed programs and I don't want to be faced with a format.

Tonight I was at a LAN party and playing Battlefield 2, my computer crashed and refused to boot into windows again. In my past experience, I would have had some sort of helpful error message like that my hal.dll is corrupted or the HDD is not detected etc. But now I cannot even boot into safe mode or safe mode with a commmand prompt. The usual list of items loading doesn't even appear. It is just a black screen after the usual bios bootup. I have reset and played with my bios already, it's not that.

I know my hardware is fine because I luckily have a year old (and so useless as none of my stuff is there but it is a proper version of windows with most of the drivers for all my hardware) backup of this windows install on the boot partition of an external drive which I hooked up via E-sata and fooled the computer into booting off of. I am currently running this and doing a windows check disc of the actual harddrive which will not boot into windows.

I don't know what to do at this point. I don't want to do a windows repair from the recovery console because in my experience, it fixes windows but resets many things back to stock windows and I'll lose a lot of my settings, registry edits, customized GUI, etc. What can I do? I figure that something is corrupted on that harddrive that is hanging when windows tries to load but I don't know what. In the past, it would tell me (like hal.dll) and I could replace that one file with a backed up one but now I don't know what to change or to do.

Thanks