Is it a dell? Just wondering since i've had a few work laptops do the same kind of thing. The recovery was via the disc that came with it, not win 7 but dell recovery disc.
It is a dell. I got the discs from Dell and had to reload windows from scratch using the dell recovery discs
This is why I pony up for a full copy of windows. A gateway did something similar to yours and because all I had were recovery disks, I couldn't just repair the bad sector. Oh no, I had to restore everything.
And gateways have done it to me TWICE. Sigh.