

Come to see all you wonderful smart techies....

Here's the issue
My hp pavilion dv4-1123us running vista suddenly decided it wasn't going to boot up
It was operating fine other than it wasn't picking up the other computers on the network (which it would occasionally do and a reboot usually cured that) so I was going to reboot it since I needed to access things on the other computers for work and was too lazy (plus was watching wrestling) and didn't want to leave the couch.
So I hit restart and voila big black screen with the following:
Windows failed to start ...yadda yadda
use windows installation disc to repair (which of course as we all know do NOT come with the computers these days)
File : \Boot\BCD
Status: OxcOOOOOOf (could be zeroes instead of O's)
Info: an error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data
I did the F11 thing to try and get a backup of some VERY VERY important data on there and of course it doesn't give me the option of where to save it to and says (after scanning for data for over 5 minutes) there is no usb drive (well I wanted to back it up to disc but they dont' give me that option) and even when I stuck a flash drive in, it doesnt' recognize it as being there and won't bring up the next screen...
I started to do a recovery back to factory settings (just to make the tech girl happy, she didn't believe me when I told her if it wouldn't back up one way that it wouldn't back it up by running something else when it was doing the EXACT same thing) but ALAS I was right and it wouldn't back it up that way either so I cancelled that till I could come here and get help on recovering my important data....
I knew if there was any way possible you all could help....
so folks...how do I get my data and how do I make it boot up?

BTW I had not installed ANY new hardware, software or anything else...