Dell Laptop won't boot normally or in to safe mode windows 7

[danjoy]

I'm working on my brother's girlfriend's Dell Inspiron 1764 that will begin to start windows and then immediately goes back to the post screen. I have tried to do a system restore, and recover from a system image... but of course she has made neither of these backups. The laptop will not load windows in safe mode and i have also tried to disable driver signature enforcement. I'm not exactly sure what happened before the failure, but i know my brother installed a Honda data logging program called HONDATA right before it crashed so I am suspecting some sort of driver issues. Is there anything else i can do besides the full Dell system restore that would wipe all of her data?

 

[soundguruman]

You can do a REPAIR of the OS, but no guarantee, once you have loaded "free" software into the computer, no telling what will occur.
You can take out the drive, and install it as a second drive on a working computer.
Then, drag your files out of the damaged drive, and onto a backup, such as a flash drive or DVD. Save the recovered files for re-installation on the repaired computer.

OR have a computer shop recover the files for you, and back them up.

Insert the windows 7 disk in the drive, select "upgrade" this replaces the OS files, without erasing your personal files and programs. Many times this cures a bug in the OS.

If the repairs fail, reformat the drive and load the OS from the start. Then take your back up files, and put them back in the drive.

Your files are still on the drive. SO...recover them as above...
In the future DON'T load free programs into your computers. These type of downloads cause lots of problems.