System Recovery Utility Doesn't complete, cannot boot

[Guest ScottTarone]

After the system reported a failure installing Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, it was running very slow and I noticed the "install update and shutdown" button state, so I thought perhaps the failure had something to do with an open file handle or six, so I decided to try that route... The computer will not boot now. The System Recovery utility ran, and stopped at the "options" dialog so I can load the storage drivers for my SATA card. The drivers were loaded and a dialog pops up stating that the utility is "Searching for Windows installation". I can see in the main dialog behind it that it found the right installation (there is only one), but the "searching" dialog never goes away.

 

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