Blue Screen of Death

[jmatta]

I second (third?) removing the hard drive and hooking to another laptop or desktop, whatever is available. I use an Apricorn EZ external drive to back up my laptop. When hooked to my desktop, I can read and copy all/any data I wish. As mentioned, sounds like your boot sector is corrupt.

I've had to "rebuild" my son's hard drive a couple times after he visited some torrents site and downloaded garbage.

[mookarma]

Thanks guys.... I will try to get my computer whizz friend to hook it up to his computer, and suggest what you've all said. I guess new tires will have to wait even longer

[Bry]

Another vote here for testing the drive externally on another computer.
If it is completely dead, you *can* still retrieve the data, but it will cost more than a few dollars. I've worked with the Ontrack data recovery service a few times, and they can recover data from physically destroyed hard drives... but you will remember writing that check, it aint cheap.