Touchsmart 300 - System Recovery and Recovery Disk Freezes at 'Starting Windows'

[jondandois]

Hello, 

I have a Touchsmart 300 running Windows 7 - 64 bit, with a single hard drive (600gb i think).  I tried setting the system up for dual-boot Ubuntu (11.04) and pretty much messed everything up.  Ubuntu does not work and I cannot get Windows to load or go into Recovery mode.

1) I tried booting into the HP System Recovery disc 1 of 3, making sure that it is actually booting into the disk by selecting it from the boot menu

• The screen shows 'Windows is loading files' and a progress bar advances for a few minutes
• Once the progress bar completes, another screen comes up with another progress bar and the 'Microsoft Corporation' text at the bottom, but the progress bar never moves and nothing happens. I have let it sit for an hour and nothing happens.

2) I get the same results with another Windows 7 64 bit full installation disc from work.

3) I can get to the Startup Repair menu with a Vista 64bit full installation disc, but repair does not work, and it reports an 'Osmismatch' error.  

4) I have used the Vista Startup repair and tried the command line suggestions from the EasyBCD website with no errors, but also no results in terms of getting the system to boot.  I have not tried the 'Option Three: Nuclear Holocaust' suggested at that site.

5) If at the HP boot splash screen I hit F11 to go into System Recovery I get to the Windows Error Recovery Screen, with the following options and results

• Safe Mode -  Freezes at Loaded: \Windows\system32\DRIVERS\AtiPice.sys
• Safe Mode with Networking - same as Safe Mode
• Safe Mode with Command Prompt - same as Safe Mode
• Last known good configuration - shows the progress bar with 'Microsoft Configuration' but there is no progress and the system freezes, like this but without the green bars
• Start Windows normally - same as last good configuration

6 ) And if I just let the computer to boot it goes to Windows Error Recovery Screen with the same options as above.

7) For anyone keeping track that I tried setting up dual booting with Ubuntu, somewhere near the beginning in all of the above (I'm sorry I cannot say when) the Grub loader just stopped coming up.  Ubuntu and its swap partitions are still present in the main drive though.  I think Ubuntu (11.04) loaded correctly once when it was first installed, but I have a feeling that after a reboot Windows 7 didn't like that Grub was there and basically sh*t the bed - this based on my hours of online research so far.

So... I think I have totally fracked this thing. With an Ubuntu LiveCD I can easily access the main C: drive and have backed up to external drive anything that is important.

At this point I am fine with the 'quick and dirty' - get a fresh Windows 7 OS running from formatted hard drives, but can I rebuild from a formatted drive with these HP System Recovery discs?

Help? Anybody?  Thanks!