It is most likely a failing hard drive. I suggest saving your stuff if you can and checking SMART status of the drive. If raw data for Current Pending Sector Count and/or Offline Uncorrectable Sector Count are anything but 0, you have a dying drive and need to replace it. If the hard drive isn't failing, running system restore from within the recovery environment should be able to bypass the updates and allow you to boot it again.
hold power button 12 seconds.. boot usb or dvd win 7.. repair comp. advanced options. system restore. while youre there might as well do sfc /offbootdir= and /offwindir.. google it. btw thread belongs in win 7 not hardware.
Problem solved,after doing all the great suggestions above, I figured out the issue -->Took out hard drive,hooked up to another Desktop Computer,ran chkdsk, severely corrupted hard drive.. boooom.....
I had this issue recently. Intel 80GB SSD was not corrupted. Turns out that doing 50-150 updates at one time was simply too much. Did the updates 15 at a time - no issues, all updates installed.