My DeskTop Won't boot up. HELP!

[RedBrain]

I just received the updated the service pack 2 yesterday. I'm not sure if that has anything to do with this or not....

Everything was working fine, until this morning.

All of a sudden my whole system locked up. I restarted it and it goes to a black screen with an option of hitting F1 to re-boot or F2 to enter setup.

F1, does nothing but flash the same message, when struck.

F2 goes into the set up screen.

I tried to hit F8 while restarting, to get to safe mode, but it wont let me.

I also tried to boot up with the WinXp disk and I can't do that either.

My whole life is on that computer and I need to be able to at least get on and copy some files to a networked computer.

(I am currently on my lap top)

Please help if you can.

[maxXPsoft]

Sounds like some boot file's messed up. There are numerous thing's it could be and cure's for most of them so look around this forum and do the bootfix and stuff but if everything else fail's;

A simple method would be install a second drive to the computer. Format install yada yada. You enter the new doze, there you can copy things from the defunct drive if it's any good.

Note: you may need to use cacls or xcacls to gain permission's to gain access to things on this previous drive. Learn the cacls command's before you get there. Done this twice before, once for me and once for a friend.