I have a Lenovo with Vista Business installed

During an up date from MS there was a Network failure

It does not bott up and goes to REcovery where it fails

Have used DVD and tried and failed to restore to any of the Restore Points that have been selected

Can one manually go in as in XP and move SAM; DEFAULT; SYSTEM and SOFTWARE from a restore Point in System Volume Information? I am not able to locate these files and suspect they do not exist

thanks

While I haven't tried this with Vista, it should be possible to do it the same way as you did it with XP. System Volume Information is still the storehouse for the restore points, and the registry hives are still located where they were in XP.

Does Startup Repair work? http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial148.html
That's what it was designed for.

thanks for the reply

unfortunately the start up repair does not work

the problem is I cannot locate the snapshots and hence the files

How are you attempting to locate the snapshots? When in Windows you generally won't be able to access the System Volume Information folders - and even if you do, it won't help since you can't replace the hives while they're in use.

I use a copy of Windows PE 2.0 to do this at work, but I suspect that you can use the BartPE or the Ultimate Boot CD to do the same thing (or maybe even a copy of a Live Linux distro).