>before going that drastic, I'd try removal with a toolset booting from linux (unless that already failed) - after back up of user files, which should be first IAC.

When I had a case few weeks ago, it was exactly the boot-into-linux that saved me. The disk which was allegedly unreadable by windows (ten bad sectors on 640G) and was sitting there for dozens of minutes doing invisible chkdsk, was visible just right from linux (at least the good partitions of it) and I managed to copy everything to where I wanted it. Then I hooked that disk as an USB drive and didn't turn it on until windows finished booting - and thus copied the rest from that partition. And guess what, even on this zip bang 8-core 16G system, windows takes about a minute to boot (and then when it's "finished" it keeps rattling the disk for a few more minutes), linux from a thumb drive boots in 15 seconds.