Vista - Vista Home Premium 64bit Boot Loops

I have a 4 month old HP desktop running 64 bit Vista Home Premium. Historically its been running great. This could be unrelated, I loaded Norton 360 on it a week ago and its been nagging me to set up the backup. I set it up the other night and it failed. Being tired I decided to look at it the next day. The next day it would not boot. It goes through the bios and as soon as it gets to windows it loops back and starts over. I have run the F9 diagnostics and all the hardware checks out. I can't F11 into the recovery partition so I have ordered the recovery cd's from HP. I have checked all the connections to the mother board, memory, HD's, cabling etc, with no luck. I can't imagine what would have happened other than Norton overwriting something on C drive when it tried to backup. (who knows with Norton). If anyone knows anything for me to try please let me know.

BTW, I can't boot into any safe mode, nor restore last good settings, etc.

Is saving your personal files a concern or not really necessary?

sounds like norton messed up another computer,

if you dont have anything on it that you really need just do a clean re install of vista

You could try running the vista repair diagnostics if you have a vista disc. You should also contact Norton. Support is included in the price. I'm installing 360 soon but can you be sure it was Norton?

On HP's there's an entry at the top of the Safe Mode screen to "Repair your computer".
Can you get to this? It'll launch the Startup Repair tool in an attempt to repair the system.

If not, here's a link for some Startup disks that you can download: Startup Repair ISO's (originally posted 22Mar08) - Vox

No, I don't know for sure it was norton360, could be a coincidence but the failed backup was the last operation before shutdown. Also, I can't boot to anything, safemode included. I have actually tried the NeoSmart recovery disk and it allowed me to get on but could not do much from there as it could not recognize my harddrive. I don't know why. I know my hard drive spins on startup which I realize is no indication of it being good. But again when I use F9 and it checks the hardware it reports my hard drive as being fine. I should get my restore disks in a few days and probably will have to reinstall. i was just hoping for a cure I had not thought of. Thanks for all the help everyone.

As in my previous post,if you need to salvage personal files
before they are lost due to the reinstall - there are ways.

Ardneh

Ardneh, please let me know your method to keep the personal files. I was hoping that the restore/recovery disks would have a option to recover without loosing all my data. If not yes I would like to know how to keep my personal information.

There is more than one way of doing this. The way I'm used to is with
a Ubuntu Linux Live CD and copying files onto a USB Flash Drive.

Download site:

Download Ubuntu | Ubuntu

Choose Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop

After downloading the file,burn it as an image to a CD or DVD.

I use Imgburn for this.

ImgBurn - Download

In Imgburn use the top-left option --- Write Image File To a Disc