Vaio CS21 suddenly crashed

My laptop has been working great since I got it three months a go - it's a Vaio CS21 with Vista, then today when I switched it on I got the Windows Boot Manager page and the message that windows couldn't launch and that I'd need to insert the installation disk (which Sony doesn't provide when yoy buy the thing).
I'm totally clueless as to why it went from working perfectly fine last night (and shut down as per the usual process) to then today being anything but. The only software I downloaded yesterday was the NoScript add-on for Firefox - other than that I haven't done anything different from the norm (surfing the net and some photoshop work). I don't have a recovery disk (and yes I am kicking myself for procrastinating on that) so I guess I'm at the mercy of the Sony support staff come Monday morning (why don't they open at the weekend???) but I'm curious if anyone has any clue as to what might have happened to a laptop all of three months in use.

Also, and this shows my tech ignorance; given the crash, have I lost all the work, music and pictures I have saved on my hard drive?

 

Try and get yourself a 2.5 SATA usb external enclosure and see if you can get your files of your HD. You have easy access to the HD by removing a few screws on the base of your laptop.

Also, i think by pressing F10 or F8 if you've not deleted your recovery partition you should be to recover your computer yourself.

 

Try F8 when booting for Safe Mode, see if can get it to work then. As Rachel mentioned, if you have not done anything yet with the recovery DVDs, you can also press F10 when booting which will take you to the recovery console, it may have an option of repairing your OS in there.

 

Thank you both so much. As it turns out I ended up having to use F10 and resetting the laptop to the factory settings (safe mode refused to show). I don't think I lost too much from my hard drive either - the write on to my external wasn't 100% success (it hit an error at 78%) but from looking at the files and content on it, it seems like most of what I use made it.
I'm just perplexed as to why the system just crashed like that though... I'm wary of putting software and files back on to the laptop just yet in case she crashes again.

 

and now it is the perfect time to create the recovery disks as well.

cheers ...