"We only lose what we don't backup" (moderator's are known to write this.)

Any path is going to be dangerous so will you backup an image of your system so you can try different repairs and get more than one chance?

Here I could use CLONEZILLA to backup an image of the existing system to that external drive (not an offer to write a clonezilla tutorial) and then I would have a way to try fixing this in many ways. Clonezilla is widely written about so if I wrote a step by step I would be duplicating web pages.

I might even consider installing Windows 7 as an upgrade.


Bob