My daughter’s laptop crashed on Monday and goes to the safe mode screen on startup, but no option will work. Whenever you select one you get a blank screen.

First crash, the screen went to a horizontal line at bottom she had to power off, but on powering on it just tells her she may have to run recovery. However, after doing that all last night, the result is a corrupt registry.

Now there seems to be no way to do a re-installation a la XP where it preserves all your files, the recovery disk wants to wipe everything. Also, she couldn’t find a recovery console, just a line where she was told to type a line(?) and she said that the program couldn’t find her installation. Sorry to be vague but I don’t use Vista and she is some miles away.

At some stage also she tried another option to re-install Vista and was prompted to insert a driver disk so Vista could see her HDD, but her driver disk had no suitable drivers. (It is a SATA disk.)

Now she has a fingerprint reader with encryption on this machine, so my question really is:

(a) If I get her a new disk and put the old in an enclosure, will she be able to read it?

(b) Will spending £100 on an OEM Vista Premium disk solve these problems?

I don’t normally ask for help, but I am desperate on this one, as she has a lot of not-backed-up Uni work on the HDD and has an essay due in on Monday!!!