Vista Home Basic 32bit boot failure

After accidentally restoring F2 setup to default on my Dell Inspiron 531 (I presumed pressing F9 would reset the settings on only the page I was on at the time) my system NEVER boots past the loading screen (with the little green bars) it just loads for a while then hangs.


It was originally saying there was a diskette drive failure, but I found that was because it had somehow decided it had a floppy drive (it didn't) then hanging in the previously described fashion although I fixed the floppy drive issue by telling it in setup that there wasn't one.

This leads me to believe that this issue may have been caused by setup restoring something else without my knowledge, although I am not an expert in this.

The computer will not boot from the HDD, nor will it boot from the Vista disk I recieved with the computer. The only way I can get anything other than the hanging loading screen is by booting from the utility partition, which gives me the option to run tests which just tell me everything's fine.

Thank you in advance for your help,

Joe.