Win XP Home will not boot up

[SDeaf]

My Fujitsu Siemens Laptop has some semi-important stuff on it which I need to get access to.

It comes up to a black screen, saying that windows did not start properly.
I have tried the Safe Mode (all of them), Last Known & Normal as my boot options, but none boot up.

When I try 'Normal', the Win XP screen comes up for a few moments, then reverts back to the black screen.

I cannot seem to get Windows Recover to be helping either. It brings me to the C:\> prompt, but will not even do a DIR. I can change to D: drive and DIR the CD Drive though. CHKDSK seems to hang about 5% through when i try it from Recovery.

Are there any utilities out there for recovering my Win XP installation - I'd rather not lose anything on the PC, but I need it going urgently.

Any help would be appreciated.

[SDeaf]

When I enter Recovery Console, it does not give me a current C:\WINDOWS to choose as my installation.

I get a couple of lines about Recovery, then a C:\> Prompt. I cannot even CD to the WINDOWS directory.

[Shoreguy]

Boot from a cd with either Avast!, AVG, or Kaspersky and do a full scan 1st.
Your PSU, Memory or HDD may be going out. Load Seatools (from Seagate) and memcheck on the same CD and run them after the virusscan.
Has the laptop been dropped or set down roughly in recent days?
...just some opening thoughts

[Sterling_Aug]

It does sound like the hard drive is going/has already gone bad.

You may be able to recover the data if you need to.

http://www.runtime.org/faq_gdb.htm