[Kipper is King]

Hoping CP can help out here. Our family PC, a Dell that's a few years old that originally ran Win. 7 and was recently upgraded to Windows 10, won't boot up anymore.

Making matters worse, I thought I had a recovery image on a portable hard drive, but it turns out I don't.

The error message that comes up seems to indicate that files are missing from the operating system.

Oddly, my dad was apparently able to boot up the computer normally once since the error started occurring. He thought everything was fine, turned off the computer and is now unable to boot it up again.D'oh.

Basically, the Dell logo comes up and we can access the BIOS. That seems to be about it.

Does anyone have any guidance in terms of preserving the data on the hard drive? I don't care about needing to reset Windows, but i am hoping to preserve photos and documents.