What I experience a few days ago is related to corrupted windows operating system (OS) using windows 7 which cannot be restored or repaired normally. The problem occurred when the desktop was accidentally drop by a child which affected the hard drive. After a few try to repair itself (advantage of latest windows platform), or somehow tried to perform a restoration to an early stage to no avail, I decided to re-install windows 7 and solved the problem.
What about the files? Most of us surely want to retrieve or recover those files as much as possible. There are two options in the installation process which are using Upgrade or Custom. Upgrade means replacing your current version with the latest one keeping your files and system intact. Meaning, you don't have to worry about you important files. While Custom means, according to Microsoft, replaces you current version with the latest one but not preserve you files and system which is considered a new installation. But, I found out that using custom installation using the same system drive and not formatting it will allow you to recover your files but not the programs.
During the re-installation it will prompts you that old files and folders will be placed in the Windows.old folder so you can copy it later (within in a short period) to another folder before they will automatically deleted. You can find the Windows.old folder below the Windows folder newly created in system drive - C drive. Then you can delete the Windows.old folder too. How long will it work is under observation since I found about 9 bad sectors in the drive which may cause the drive to fail.
Formatting the drive is only needed when we wanted to have a clean installation, meaning erasing all sorts of unnecessary files including some virus or malwares that causing the computer to slow down. If those files are not really important you can format the drive instantly. Otherwise, you need to re-install the OS without formatting the drive and recovers those files you needed.
