Okay, so looks like computer problems will be an annual thing for me. So I was away for a few days and my brother had plugged his USB (presumably to charge his Android phone) into my laptop which was left on. When I logged in, I got a pop-up saying that there was an error with the USB. I've received this message before and it never affected me in any way. Plus I'd connect my iPhone to it so I knew they were functioning. Yesterday, I logged in and all the pages that I had left up were still there as well as iTunes. The cursor worked but when clicking, there was no functionality. I tried ctrl/alt/del which did nothing so I just shut it down and turned it back on. When it got to the Windows boot screen, I noticed that the MS logo was not there. After that, Windows wouldn't load. I've tried Startup Repair which doesn't do anything and a system restore which also didn't work. After running some diagnostics, it says there's an "I/O error". From what I've been able to gather online, I'm thinking that the earlier USB error message led to this crash. Is there anything I can do? My Windows 7 discs are back in Spain but if those won't allow me to reformat, I'll have to buy a laptop here in the US before I head back to Spain. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.
Try using system restore. I used it when my wife downloaded a virus. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/features/system-restore
Yeah, tried that but it said it couldn't restore to a previous version because of a hard disk error. Thanks for the tip though. I ended up just backing everything up and reformatting, which was kind of a bitch. But I discovered that Windows 7 backs everything up for you so I have all my old files in a folder called Windows.old. It's pretty neat since everything is there. Unfortunately, I don't know how to reinstall MS Office, which I forgot to back up to my external hard drive. Oh well.
What all do you have connected to your USB connections? And how many total USB connections do you have?