I just got my new laptop pc last week and everything was absolutely fine until today when I restarted my computer after installing IE8 (and foolishly a program meant for 32bit Windows only) and then the worst thing possible happened. I got a black screen telling me that "Windows failed to start. A recent hardwar or software change might be the cause." And it says it's missing the partmgr.sys file. It tells me to use the Windows installation disc to fix it. However, my PC didn't come with such disc. It only came with recovery discs(it's split into 2 parts). I'm not entirely sure how to use that. My friend told me to simply download the official Windows Recovery disc from a torrent, burn it and then use it to boot my computer. It's supposed to fix my computer without deleting my HDD. So I did. However, my computer did not boot the CD when I restarted it. Someone told me that it's because I might have to configure my BIOS to boot with the DVD drive first when starting. I have no clue how to do that. And I can't even access Windows at all because Safe Mode doesn't work either. I'm completely lost and very VERY distressed as I really don't have the money to take it to a technician and there are some important files in there that I didn't get the chance to backup yet.
So my questions are:
1) What should be the best thing for my to do? The recovery program I downloaded seems great as a lot of people have had success with it. But my computer won't run it for some reason.
2) If that doesn't work, should I use the two-disc recovery that my manufacturer supplied? I tried that as well. Again, my computer didn't read it when starting.
My computer info:
OS: Windows Vista Premium 64bit
Manufacturer/Model: ASUS N80 Vn-X5 Laptop
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo P8600(2.4ghz)
Ram : 4Gb
GPU : Nvidia Geforce 9650M GT
