Problem with M50SV-A1

Hi, I'm having a problem with my notebook and was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on how to deal with it. It's an Asus M50SV-A1 as the title suggests and it's running 32 bit Vista.
I went to turn it on yesterday morning and everything seemed fine until it got to the screen that says Windows on it and has the progress bar near the bottom - the one that has a couple green bars moving through it until the next screen loads. The next screen being the log-in screen. Any way, it got to this screen, but wouldn't go on to the log-in screen. It just kept cycling the green bars through the progress bar. After a minute or so I manually shut it down and then restarted it. I selected "start windows normally" as I figured it would sort itself out, but it did the same thing again.
Restarted it again, and this time tried to boot it in "Safe Mode". It says "Loading Windows Files" at the top like it should, loads a bunch of drivers, says "Please wait..." on the bottom, but gets no further than this.
I've tried this multiple times, leaving it for quite some time, but it never gets past the two screens I've described above. I'm not sure what I can do. I've also put the Recovery DVD in and tried to boot up, but it won't do anything differently.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated, as I don't think I can even format the computer in the state it's in.

Thanks,

Jason

 

What happened before this, did you change any drivers? Windows update maybe? There's a pretty well known bug in Vista where it keeps looping thru appying updates, but it doesn't sound like that's your problem.

Try last known good configuration from the boot screen where you selected safe mode if it's available.

You might want to try a chkdsk on the drive to clear up any errors. That won't be possible if you can't boot into safe mode, however. You could make a recovery console CD and try it from there.

If you can't format your system (which is doubtful...) that is usually a hard disk going bad.

It could also be faulty RAM, but that's much less likely.

Please post what you did before this happened and that'll hopefully give someone here an idea

 

The night before I had to shut it down manually as it froze. I was using firefox and the page stopped responding. Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the task manager and close the browser, but the task manager wouldn't pop up. So I shut it down. Next morning when I turned it on, this happened.

I think Windows had updated itself within the last day or two.

I also tried "Last known good configuration", but it lead to the same screen as "Start Windows Normally".

Thanks for the reply. Hopefully this will help somebody.