Unkown problem

My friend has a Dell Inspirion Laptop running Vista. The laptop will not boot. It runs the windows load screen then starts processing a series of files freezing with a message of "0xc0190036 !! 1909/100432 (msdtctm.dll)". When trying to boot into safemode it stops at windows\system32\drivers\crcdisk.sys. I booted into the repair feature of the installation and tried to repair the boot cycle, it failed. I tried a load a restore point, that failed. My friend has files and programs they would like saved, does anybody have any suggestions before I try a complete system restore?

 

This might be worth trying

Put in the battery, plug the computer to the outlet and turn it on.

 

So I tried that and it did not work. However the system ran a repair at the boot up which gave me a diagnosis that states that the Root cause for the failure is: "System volume disk corrupted". So I am thinking that the last update that was run was damaged and destroyed something important. Does anyone have a suggestion how to reinstall the OS without damaging or loosing the existing users files? Again it is Windows VISTA.

 

This is exactly why you're not supposed to keep you data files on your system partition. You do have a current backup of the data files, don't you?
If not, you might be able to fix the hard drive by using the "fixboot" and "fixmbr" commands. Do a Google search on those commands to find out how to run them. You might get lucky.