If you confirm that the problem is NOT hardware, then you can try to fix your original install of Windoze. If it is hardware, resolve that and you may not lose your working environment.
Having the working environment depending on any specific piece of hardware is a violation of the "Always have an exit plan" philosophy.
My frustration with the braindead 90s design ideas of home directories in Windows NT is due to me wanting the account-specific data to be accessible from any computer, not depend on any specific workstation.
That's great
in principle. In practice, people want a box that
just works without
ever being forced to play AD Admin (or whatever flavor you prefer) and fix something that got randomly got borked in
another box before you even have your morning cuppa over skimming the most recent eMails.
Sadly, Winbloze is still the closest thing we have to "it just works" on whatever collection of junk you may have that calls itself a PC.
So... now that I've vented that frustration... We all
eventually must bow down and pray before the altar of the god of
WHAT IS... and for most people, that is the fact that
most of their work environment is in one box. Yes, it's laziness, and yes there are ways to make it much more redundant... but
those require either that you have somebody else to be your admin, or that you take on that role yourself and eventually wind up admin-ing something before that morning ritual, etc.
My solution is to just keep a known-good hard drive handy, so that if something goes pear-shaped, I can easily boot from
something else and diag the core hardware without losing my live environment.
None of this has anything to do with the 11th Commandment; which if you don't obey, you
deserve to lose all your shit. It is just the assache of restoring from backup and
then discovering that won't fix it that I'm trying to avoid here.
It takes 10 minutes to do a fresh install of Winblows; 15 if you have to D/L the iso fresh.
That is is a bargain as far as time spent on a diagnostic step.
mnem