Windows 2000 Pro won't start

[Heartofgold]

A friend asked me to fix his computer. It's a P III 566 with 256 Ram. It has 3.5 gig hard drive. There was windows 98 on it when it was new. Before he got it Windows 2000 Pro was installed on it. It was running good until a few weeks ago. It wouldn't load and had to be restarted numerous times before it would start.

Now it won't start at all. I got it to the point where all the opinions like safe mode, Last known setup etc. I tried each one and restarted the computer but still won't load.

I want to put a copy of Windows 98SE on it, but there are hundreds of photos on here that he would like to keep or save. So I don't want to reformat and lose them

I"ve run out of ideas. Anyone out there know what's up?

[luke.mccormick]

Might wanna run some hard drive tests, almost seems like the hard drive could be failing, were there any other symptoms?

slap the drive in another system and backup all the photos and then play around with some drive tools