Vista Endless boot

Hi All,
Well my bosses laptop (Fujitsu life book A)
is stuck in an endless boot cycle,
It starts as normal and shows the start up screen then goes to
installing update 3 of 3 0% then shows shutting down and re starts to do it over and over again.
The real problem is he used the finger print scanner as his only password and
it isnt working in the repair area (read as needs password and he has none)
also the only restore option he has is on the partion we cant access.
I pulled the hard drive in the hopes of slaving it to my computer and just deleating the offending update but when I accsess the file and try to delete it says i dont have permission to do it. I also tried to rename the file and delete but it again says I dont have permission.
Any ideas other than buy new cd and clean install? is is a last resort but
I am just looking for any help before i jump off the reformat cliffrolleyes
Herb

 

If he has no password, just press enter in the box.

When the pc powers on, tap F8 for safe mode, log in as admin, START, RUN, MSCONFIG, uncheck startup items and go to Control Panel\Windows Update\Change settings, disable updates, ok, restart pc.

To delete a file in Vista, you may have to take ownership of that file, add your account to permissions tab.

If you have 2000/XP/Vista at home, slave his drive & boot to YOUR windows, his drive will be seen as a non-OS drive. You can do all sorts of damage to it.

 

What version of Windows are we dealing with?
If it's XP, you should be able to slave the drive to your PC, take ownership of the offending file, and rename/remove it after taking ownership (taking ownership will give you the permissions to modify the file/folder). More info on taking file ownership in XP can be found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/810881/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308419/en-us
Yeah, I know the Lifebook drive is Vista, but you're slaving it to your PC which I'm assuming is running XP. I couldn't find any info about file ownership/permissions in Vista, and I'm thinking that most of the info in the links I provided will cross over to Vista....

Good luck!

 

I am running Vista Home But thank you i'll keep those links for xp just in case!