Problem with booting up laptop after upgrading Vista SP1 - Help please!

I was upgrading my wife's Vista machine with SP1 when it was at 98% for a long time. Being that we were heading out, I rebooted it because I thought it had hung. Now, Vista's startup repair is coming up and trying to fix it, but it can't. Being that it's my wife's laptop, there are no restore points to recover from. In the advanced options, I can get to a command prompt and I tested it and I can manually copy her pictures and files onto a USB drive. Is there any other way to get the system back up and running without startinf from Scratch? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I don't have recovery disks and when I called HP support, they said that my product appeared to be out of warrantly (probably bought 1 1/2 years ago). I'm not that familiar with Vista so I've been googling things but still no luck.

Here's the problem - OS tries to startup and can't - then goes to Startup Repair which tells me that it is unable to repair it automatically. I can get into "System Recovery Options". Question: Other than the command prompt and manually copying the files, what does Restore Application (WinRE Manager 32 bits) - will it delete all the personal files? Is this an HP recovery tool? Please help - it says that it will restore to original factory condition - does that mean no personal files remain? Help please!