I feel real stupid about this one.
Before I go any further I would like to state that I have a registry backup I created two hours prior to this and I should have system restore checkpoints all over the place.
Recently I had somehow corrupted SolidWorks and I was manually uninstalling all it's components, including registry components. Somehow as I was selecting the SolidWorks registry folder in WoW6432Node I ended up selecting the parent directory and sort of deleting (almost) all it's contents...
After this I could not run the registry backup I made (with CCleaner so I'm not 100% sure how complete it was), mainly due to the fact that the file hierarchy of windows is now completely screwed. I also couldn't run system restore, and so I decided to try running using a System Repair Disk I prepared on my laptop.
Sadly this process required me shutting off my, and my luck has gone ever since. First I receive a message saying "Cannot find Recovery Partition". Next, when it tried to run system repair it couldn't find C:.
One (possibly useful) thing it did was add a previous Windows install I had kept from my hdd days to the boot list.
Later when I reached a menu that let me select system restore when I tried navigating to C: all I could see was a few temporary files.
For now I've booted into the old hdd OS. I can explore the my primary boot drive but the question is how can I repair the OS? Is there anyway I can restore that registry while I'm on a different OS. Can I initiate a system restore for that partition from this OS; I certainly haven't had much luck when I've tried to run repairs from my repair disk...
I'd really like to not reinstall the main OS, and I guess I could always migrate my hdd to the ssd, but I'd like to exhaust all the possibilities first.
EDIT: As an update, so far I have found my recent System Restores for the primary drive as options options on my hdd OS System REstore.