Need help with an "OS not found" error

[Glass Joe]

So, my sister-in-law comes to me and tells me her computer "just stopped working". She has a Sony Vaio that she got last January and she only really has ever used it for email/facebook/etc... She claims that she stepped away from using it for a few moments and the computer went into sleep mode. When she came back and woke it up, Bam! everything is gone.

It seems to get to some kind of desktop. There are no icons, no bar across the bottom with a Start button, nothing to select at all. The only thing there is the mouse cursor. Now every time I turn the computer on it goes into Windows Error Recovery and gives me the options to "launch start up repair (recommended)" or "Start Windows Normally". No matter which one I pick it still gets me to the desktop that you can see in the attached picture. The first time that I tried to start it in Safe Mode it gave me an "OS not found" error. Since then when I try to launch Safe Mode it just brings me back to the Windows Error Recovery screen.

Any ideas on what could have gone wrong or how to fix it? To make matters worse she never made a recovery disk. By the way, it was running Windows 7 Home Premium just so you know. I figured I would ask here to see if the more skillful can help before she takes it somewhere and has to pay out the ass to fix it. Sorry for the shitty pic, I used my phone's camera.

[Advocate]

I had the same issue with my older HDD. I'd like to hear the answer myself.

I basically replaced the HDD and had a burned copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. The old HDD is still with me, but I'd like to recover the old one, due to the music I had stored.