beast8812 :
Any suggestions? I considered just wiping the hard drive but I dont really want to have to guy buy another windows 7 product key. Plus i've never wiped a hard drive so I have no idea where to begin and if I have to leave any files on it.
I have to start by saying that it would help immensely to know what happened just before you saw this error.
I was seeing this error a few weeks ago while attempting to move my C:\Users directory to another drive in my system (via robocopy + mklink). I was getting the error because my user profile wasn't being copied correctly, and was getting messed up, so when I would try to boot, windows didn't see a valid user profile. I even saw the same error message when booting into safe mode.
Now, you can pretty easily recover this by wiping your hard disk, and you don't need to purchase a new windows product key (as long as you have your product key still, and it's legit, if you've got a prebuilt pc, usually theres a sticker with the key somewhere). The difficult part is backing up all of your files on that drive before you wipe it, if you know where you keep your data it can be pretty painless, but be cautious and aware that if you miss something it will be gone for good.
I'll give some brief backup instructions here, if you know what to do, you can skip this bit. Start out by getting an external hard drive, or a sizeable thumb drive. The two biggest folders to get are C:\Users and C:\ProgramData (program data is pretty well hidden, you'll need to make it visible), if you use steam for games, C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps is another good one to backup (so you don't have to re-download games). You should look around for anything else, typically most of your data for programs is stored under users and program data though. Copy all these files onto your backup drive (do this from safemode so you have a UI), double and triple check that you get all of your data, as wiping the drive isn't easily reversible (no recycle bin). Once you get your new windows install, you will want to go through the backups you made, and hand copy your data from the backup into the new folders windows created for you. Go through each folder under Users/admin, and in program data look for applications you care about the settings for such as firefox, and copy that data from your backup to the new directory (some programs may not like this, so be careful with overwriting existing stuff).
So. Basically what you'll need to do is boot from your windows disk and select custom install (or advanced or whatever), early in the process it will bring up a menu showing you all of the hard drives in your system (be extra sure you select the correct drive) select your current windows drive, and below the drives, there should be an option labeled format (it will have an eraser icon if I remember right), when you select that option, it will erase everything on your drive. Then, you can just click next, and go through the rest of the windows install just like you have been doing.
Once you get back to your fresh desktop follow the instructions above for restoring your data and you should be all set.