HELP!!! Vista Ultimate SP1Perpetual Reboot

[dreadman]

I hope someone can help me out.
Last night before going to bed I let vista install all the outstanding updates it had been nagging me about.
It prompted me to restart today (I hadn't looked at it since last night) and I did so. However, while restarting, it became unresponsive so I stupidly held down the power knob to restart it. Now when vista loads up it comes to a screen where it says "configuring updates step 3 of 3 do not shut down and moves from 0% to 99% in seconds then automatically reboots. I tried to boot into safe mode but the update greets me there as well.
Its a dual boot with XP and vista and right now I'm using knoppix because it boots faster than xp.
Is there anything I can do...delete some folder or file or something that will let vista abort the update process and let me log in and start the process over? Oh and it seems I can't boot from my vista disc. It autoplays under XP but won't boot from it.

Thanks in advance for your help and time

 

[mpilchfamily]

perform a repair install of Vista. Should be able to sort out the problem.

 

[dreadman]

Thanks for the advice. I'm a bit nervous about that because like I mentioned, I can't boot from the vista install disk. I can boot from my xp pro disk just fine.
Will running the vista installer from within windows xp trigger the option for the vista repair install or will it start a completely fresh install? I can't even remember how I did this
the first time.

 

[Sam25]

Yes, I read about this problem with Vista (SP1). You could try and boot from the Vista Install DVD and select the option "Restore from a previous restore point" option and see if it works.

 

[dreadman]

Well I haven't found a solution to this problem so I backed up my important data and reformatted the hard drive with vista on it.
Only problem is that I can't seem to reinstall vista. If I launch it from within windows xp it reaches about 27% on expanding files and then I get an error along the lines of cannot prepare the device for booting. Also my pc is unable to boot from the vista dvd. It's possible this dvd is an upgrade disk but what is troubling me is that I installed vista on this machine with no problems the first time.
I can't even remember if I booted from the dvd or from windows. I think I'll try doing an xp install and upgrading it to vista.
If anyone has any other ideas I'll appreciate it.