Error after black screen and running system restore

Hi
This is for my husbands compaq laptop running vista windows, I just want some advice, as my husband is overseas right now, so I dont have access to the actual laptop, but this is the problem thats happened

He was listening to music on earphones on laptop, then all of a sudden music stopped, he looked at the laptop and saw a black screen, he managed to get into teh PC by hitting the F8 key in safe mode, and chose to do a system restore, rebooted after it did all what it had to do, now when he goes into login screen, its giving an error saying something like ' System restore was intterruptted, cannot load windows' he has tried to do a complete re-install, but its saying there is no drive to read the disk, can anyone help please asap as hes stuck overseas, in a truck, with no PC and no internet acess.

Many Thanks

 

Please post the exact error. It will help to know if the hard drive died (the computer can not find the hard drive) or the computer is trying to boot from the CD/DVD drive. These are two very different problems with different solutions but both use similar wording.