To start thanks for reading my final attempt for help.
I've got an HP laptop that came with Vista, without the discs of course. Set to do the automatic updates, and it just went through doing one the other night. (Service pack 1 I think) After installing, when it went to reboot, Vista didn't load and instead it went to a screen saying corrupt file can't start windows, insert Vista disc and reboot. So I'm thinking would be nice if they had given me the discs.
I look online for awhile, came across some iso files on the Neosmart Site Since I don't know what version of Vista I'm running I thought I'd try both version files that they have. Both loaded up, but then when getting to the screen to do a system restore it would say this was not version for what my laptop was running, and wouldn't go any further.
So I decided to shell out the cash and purchased the HP recovery discs from Future Shop, where I bought the laptop. This loaded up fine, but in attempting to do the system restore it showed that there were no restore points to go back to, which I don't understand as I thought the default was to automatically create restore points on a regular basis. As a result my only option from these discs would be to do a full recover, meaning I lose everything on the laptop and of course I have nothing backed up and don't want to do this.
I also tried F11/F8 as I read about that on other sites, but nothing happens.
Does anyone have any ideas I can try? Maybe this has happened to you and you've got a perfect solution? Thanks!