Home Premium to Ultimate Upgrade crashed

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I was trying to upgrade from Vista Home Premium to Ultimate, and during the
last step (I think it was "Finishing Upgrade"), it stayed at 78% for a very
long time, over 2 hours, but the mouse still worked and the three blinking
periods were still scrolling, so the computer had not frozen.

At some point (I was out of the room at the time), it must have restarted
but when it booted back up I got the following message (window title was
"Install Windows"):

"The computer restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error.
Windows installation cannot proceed. To install Windows, click "OK" to
restart the computer, and then restart the installation."

But when I restart, I get the same message, over and over again. I cannot
start to safe mode. I cannot boot to DVD-ROM with Upgrade disk because it
says I have to run it from a working Windows copy. I now have three options
when it boots, "Microsoft Windows Vista", "Rollback installation" (or
something like that), and simply "Windows Vista", but all give me the same
issue.

I've tried to use the F8 option when booting from all three of these. Only
the second "Rollback" shows up as 'damaged', but it says it is an error that
Windows cannot automatically fix. The other 2 don't show up as damaged (this
is within a window with several options). I don't have a system restore point
to work from either.

At this point, it seems like I have to reinstall from the original Home
edition disk, then do the entire upgrade, but I'm guessing that will kill all
my settings and installed programs, which I'm hoping to avoid.

Any ideas?
.

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