A319 Captain reports selecting NO STAR in the MCDU during arrival after being assigned a Radar vector heading. All navigation and preflight data is lost from both FMGC's; requiring the crew to use backup NAV and reinitialize the FMGC's prior to landing.

Narrative

We were assigned a base turn by Approach. After the First Officer selected HDG mode I went to the arrivals page on the MCDU and selected no star. After about 2 seconds; the map not available message appeared on the Captain's NAV display. Shortly afterwards the same occurred on the First Officer's display followed by a CAB PR ECAM due to loss of FMGC LDG ELEV data. We also lost all initialization data including flight number; flight plan information; speed reference; weights and terrain data. The auto pilot and flight directors continued to work. We selected NAV raw data which had been manually preset. Then a waypoint was re-inserted in the flight plan page from which a lateral revision new destination was entered. The box was re-sequenced with the proper approach and the estimated aircraft gross weight plus flight number was inserted. We were able to recover the NAV capability and proceeded to land normally. This is very similar to an incident that occurred during arrival to SFO in December 2010.