I have a Lenovo 3000 N100 laptop running Vista Home Premium that will not boot after an apparently failed automatic windows update a couple of days ago. The PC boots to a cursor and a blank screen regardless of which safe mode or start normally option is selected at startup. In the safe mode options, the last driver to load is crcdisk.exe before the cursor only black screen appears, if that means anything. The PC has the capability to launch Rescue & Recovery before bootup and I've run all the hardware diagnostics and they are all fine. It also allows me to run the Event Viewer, which has several fatal system errors, many of which are in the format: "Windows Servicing failed to complete the process of changing update 943411-112_RTM_neutral_PACKAGE from package KB934311 (Security Update) into Staging (Staging) state", which are at the time the PC died.
I've tried to use F8 at boot to get to the advanced boot menu and selected use the last known good configuration and I get the same cursor only screen. To top it off, the laptop did not come with a Vista disk, so I have no way to get to Vista or a command prompt.
Rescue and Restore will allow me to start from scratch, but I'd rather not lose my data, if possible.
Any ideas?