Repair / Reinstall Windows 7 32bit After Crash

Computer: Toshiba Satellite L455-s5976 2gb ram

I am in the process of trying to repair/reinstall Windows 7 32 bit home premium after a crash that has disabled my laptop. The computer has no longer booted properly after the crash occurred when I had to control+alt+delete out of a frozen screen. I do not feel the root of the problem is from a virus of any kind as I only visit mainstream websites and my virus protection/firefox has caught the very few instances I have ever run into. When it boots now, it starts normally showing the Toshiba logo then says "windows is loading files", then shows "microsoft corporation" with the moving green bar underneath and finally after a good while goes to windows 7 backdrop with nothing else showing but the mouse pointer.

I have tried a repair disc and booted from the DVD/CD drive to no avail. My system tools do come up for use but it will not boot into safe mode. It also shows no restore points. I did the memory diagnostic and nothing came of it. I have run startup repair several times and it just sits there running..the last time running it for 4 days straight continuous with no results. When the "System Recovery Options" box pops up searching for windows installs it shows a single Windows 7 install under the E: drive with partition size of 0 mb, but im almost certain my Windows is not under drive E:, but it does not find any other Windows installs though.

I am able to look around abit at the hard drive by clicking "load drivers" under the "System Recovery Options" and this is what it shows. 4 hard drives: "system reserved (c drive" 70.1mb free of 99mb "local disc (D drive does not show size or allow me to access it when i click on it "local disk (e drive same, does not show me size or allow me to access it. Boot (x drive 29.1mb free of 31.5mb Then (f drive Repair disc windows 7 64bit. About 8 months ago the computer crashed after my daughter changed some file type assignments and we had to reinstall Windows 7. The reinstall did take, but I do not think we formatted the drives properly with the reinstall and there were several different partitions on the hard drive.

After that install it would show PXE-E61 Media Test Failure, check cable/ PXE-MOF Exiting pxe rom when it would first boot, but it still booted properly and never had any other problems with the reinstall until now. Also windows would never allow me to do a "back up" after the reinstall. When I reinstall windows this time I want to get the partitions in proper order and make sure everything is working properly so im not in this situation without a backup again. I am hoping I have not lost the data on this computer and have been looking at buying a hard drive adapter so I can connect the laptops hard drive to my home pc and hopefully recover the data off the hard drive before reinstalling windows again. Is this an effective way of preserving any data on the hard drive before I reinstall?