About 5 days ago my laptop stopped starting up properly. First some long blank screens, then some blue screens, and eventually it would always boot directly into startup repair and would tell me that it didn't know how to fix the problem. So I backed up the information of my PC(which I was able to do even with the startup issues) and gave it a factory reset. It worked absolutely great and my computer was working with full functionality, I restarted it just to make absolutely sure, and it rebooted just fine.
A day later however, I had to force shut off my computer(hold the power button for more than 5 seconds), and after booting my computer again I was back to the same exact problem I had before, my computer would boot directly into startup repair and would not work. I factory restored it again and everything went back to normal.
The thing I'm confused about is, is this really a hardware problem, or is it a software problem? My guess was if this was a hardware problem I shouldn't have been able to pull data off and backup my PC when it wasn't working, and the factory reset shouldn't have worked. I'd appreciate any insight from anyone who's had these kind of issues.
Just so you know between my first restore and my second I re-installed the following programs:
Norton Internet Security
Microsoft Office
Starcraft II
Daemon Tools
WinRAR
Google Chrome
Firefox
and that's it I think.