Windows 7 - Windows 7 update = hardware issues

A windows update (the one around 12/16/2011) went wrong. Here's the story..

I went to shut down my computer and Windows started to do an update. I went to bed and then the next day I go to turn my computer and on everything seemed fine. the mobo startup screen was shown and the windows start-up screen came up... only it looked a bit different than usual... I snapped a quick picture of it on my phone that you can look at here



it said "Applying update operation 13601 of 13601 (\Registry\Mach..)"

and then the screen went black and windows 7 never booted up. I looked down at my tower and I noticed my cousin's portable external hard drive was plugged in. I had no idea it was there when I shut it down the night before. I've left my external in my computer dozens of times though and never had any issues with microsoft updates. I took his external out and plugged it into my laptop. there was a very strange folder on it named with a bunch of letters and numbers and i could not open it and the capacity was 0 megs. i looked at the date when it was last modified and it was the night before right after i had shut my computer down and when it started to install the update. AWESOME. the only conclusion i was able to come up with is that the update started to install on the hard drive for some reason (maybe my cousin's external was larger than my computer's hd and it defaulted to it?). So anyways i was able to delete the file off of his external and then I manually shut down my computer because the screen was still black from bootup. I wait a few minutes and then turn it back on.... i get nothing. even the mobo start up screen does not boot up and the computer boots up really fast as if there is no hard drive. I assume that my hard drive is corrupted and that i have to re-install windows 7 on it. that wouldn't be such a big problem except I can't even get into my mobo's bios to change the boot sequence to something besides the hard drive (like a cd rom with Windows 7 pro). the weird thing is, if the hard drive is corrupted why is my mobo not booting up? i hear the beeps but i get nothing. this also leads me to think what if it's my graphics card... I mean it would make NO sense that my graphics card somehow stopped working over something like this considering it was just working minutes ago when windows started up with that funny message. but the fact that i'm not getting anything on my screen leads me to suspect that. so basically i can't use my computer because when i go to start it I get a black screen... my monitor is working fine but nothing comes up on it... not even the mobo startup screen so i can't even reformat the drive... any ideas about how I can fix this? did my pc just break or something? why am i having hardware issues like this because of a microsoft update that went wrong? Do I need to buy a new mobo/hd/graphics card?

thanks for any help on this and i tried to supply as much info as i could about the whole situation so sorry if this was a very long drawn out post

EDIT: so i just did some research and i found this http://news.softpedia.com/news/Windo...s-132913.shtml

i am using an ati radeon hd 4870 which is on this list. i dont know why i never had issues installing win 7 the first time but maybe this has something to do with it?