Vista Boot Problem

[AlterReality]

After building my first system and having it running smoothly for well over a month, I've encountered a problem. Last night, we had some major thunderstorms and lost power throughout the night. When I woke up this morning, I turned on my computer, but something is majorly wrong.

The computer POSTs and everything appears to load in fine. However, when it comes to loading Windows Vista, it just doesn't happen. I was stuck at the loading screen (progress bar going back and forth) for about an hour. After that was unsuccessful, I restarted my computer and tried to load into a basic Safe mode. All the drivers were listed as loading up, but the computer stalled at "Please Wait..." for a little over 2 hours.

Currently, I'm completely stumped as to what to try. My first thought is that the Harddrive is fried, however, why would safe mode be able to access the basic drivers and why would it still be recognized in BIOS if it was fried?

Any other ideas or suggestions would be appreciated!

Note: Another computer (a Dell) which was on the same Surge Protector is working without a hitch.

My current setup is:
PCP&C 750w Silencer
ASUS P5Q Pro Mobo
e8400 Wolfdale
4 gig Mushkin RAM

 

[Zoron]

Try doing a repair on Vista.

Also, a hard drive can still boot and be defective. There could be bad sectors on the drive, there could be damage from a head crash or any number of minor problems that wouldn't necessarily cause total failure. However, I'm leaning more towards file system issues from an improper shutdown in your situation. Hence, the suggestion to do a repair.