stops at 'Microsoft Corporation' screen. I think I got it to boot from a disk and to reload Vista from 1 partition, but the disk has been making the same sound over and over for the past 25 min now and i'm not sure if anything is happening. Since telling it to reload Vista the screen has been grey with a big cursor arrow (that I can move around), but no other notifications, etc.

Should I be concerned or just leave it running?

Any assistance is appreciated!

no response in Safe Mode or any other option - just goes back to the 'Microsoft Corporation' screen.

It didn't give me the option to delete the partition so I'm guessing I didn't.

Digging deeper...

in my haste, figuring nothing was happening since it had been 45 min, I shut the system down w/the power switch. Now, when I try to turn it on it gives me the 'Asus' splash screen, then a DOS message saying "BOOTMGR is missing, Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restartn".

I'm able to get to the bios to choose where the computer boots from and get the same message regardless if its set on the HDD or the CD.

Help please.

Went the 'F9' route as I have all my files backed up. seemed to work, just going through and appying the 110 recommended updates!!

once I do that, do I need to reset the system to boot from the HDD or will things be back to normal once I restart?

Thanks for all your help!! Originally took it to a local guy to said it would cost over $300 to fix and probably needed a new hard drive.....so far, it's cost me a couple hours (granted i have NO IDEA what i'm doing) and $10 for the recovery CD.

Moving right along. I restarted and everything seems cool so far. Curently installing all the updates.

Thanks to all!