It’s great that you turned it around, but your math is a bit off. If you were a full-time student for 7 years and then did CC full-time for at least a year, then you have 8 years of ballast to a GPA of ~2. Therefore, you would need about 8 years of a GPA of 6.0 (on a 4.0 scale) to get to a 4.0. Even if you shot for a cumulative GPA of 3.0, you would need years of excellent grades at the undergraduate level.
A good story, marked improvement, and good GRE scores will count for something somewhere, but not at top tier colleges.