What happened:
I was going to backup my C drive, so I snapped in a destination drive and started my computer. As it was booting I noticed the data cable on the destination drive looked loose, I reached to push it in and it came loose from the drive when I touched it. No software was running just a regular boot.
The Result:
Computer will no longer boot from C drive. I booted from a 6 months earlier copy of the C drive. The boot partitions in the (damaged?) drive now seem to have too little in them (lookig from an app) but I can see all the data is still there and I can copy it data from it.
My Attempts to Fix:
I removed all the other drives and just left the unbootable C drive there. I successfully booted from the Win 7 install disk that came new with this computer, then attempted to choose the REPAIR option. Windows responded that this was not the correct version of windows (even though this was the WIN7 CD that came with the machine.)
I have some apps like “4Ddig Windows Boot Genius” and PAassit but I’m very reluctant to try them and possibly kill the original drive that I can at least still get data from just not boot. So the status quo is that one particular piece of software that I had installed recently will not install on the 6 month old clone, something about a missing windows file.
I suppose I could take the machine to a “pro” and hope that person gets it right the first time or I could try running the Boot Genius app and pray for good results.  Thank you in advanc for your advice! 🙂