Vista - sp2 update problem

I noticed that sp2 for vista is out so I went to windows upgrade site and downloaded/installed sp2. So the computer is rebooting afterwards and my computer died, kinda. What I saw after the post was a trouble screen that told me I had a problem. At the top it said there was a problem that may have been caused by either new hardware or software recently installed. It said I should select from the menu below to fix the trouble. Cool I thought, but I found I had no keyboard input so I couldnt select what I wanted to do from that list. All I could do was watch the thing continue to load. When it was all said and done my computer displayed some sort of hexidecimal code, white letters/numbers on a black screen. Right now my computer is pretty much dead to me and I'm writing from another computer.
I've always just did what Windows asked me to do, followed the directions to the letter, etc. I have some experience with SP upgrades from using XP and upgrading when ever upgrades were availiable. I didnt expect to run into any problems with Vista updates. Windows has always done all the work and I've really never had a trouble with their OS.
I bet you can tell I'm not the brightest bulb on the tree when it comes to this level of technology. So if anybody can help me recover from this problem, please explain it as if you were talking to a complete idiot. Thank you.

Jim

Try and boot into safe mode (usually by pressing f8 on boot up) and do a system restore

Thanks I'll try that.

Good luck post back if more info needed , very helpful bunch here , will soon sort you out !!

No help on hitting F8 or any other F key. Still had the same issue, so I bought a new hard drive, installed Vista on it, then hooked up the corrupt drive and was able to access the stuff I needed from it and transfered it to the new one. My biggest loss though was my contacts list from the email program. That's just a pain in the "A double scribble" since I have all that info on my phone. So all in all not to bad a hit.

Hopefully I will be able to format this corrupted drive and reuse it. It's a 1TB and the new one is only 350MB.

My brother, not as sharp as you guys, but with a little more experience than me, said it looks like the files that tell the computer to load up the OS after the POST got deleted or messed up somehow. I want to say he called it the .bak or .bat file. I dont know.

Anyway thanks for your help.

Jim