Hello everyone,

Yesterday, when I turned on my computer, Windows XP did not boot up! It

just showed the Dell logo (I have a Dell Desktop) and then it went to

black as it usually does before showing the Widows XP logo. But after

that nothing else appeared. It just stayed black and the computer's

hard-drive acticity light went nuts, but the screen stayed black until

I was forced to reboot.
Then I proceeded to use my Windows Reinstallation CD and upgrade

Windows XP hoping that it would fix the problem without having to

re-format the hard-drive. But after it installed some files, it

re-booted to start the actual re-installation of windows, but again

nothing showed up after the black screen. I also fixed the boot sector

and the master boot record with the windows re-installation cd, but it

didn't help at all.
At this point I said to myself "screw it, I'll just install Windows XP

on my second HDD and attempt to recover the files on my master HDD once

I get XP running on my second HDD," but to my suprise once I got XP

running on my second HDD and went to My Documents in my C drive (C is

my primary HDD, the one that doesn't boot) but I was greeted with the

following message:

C:\Documents and Settings\Owner is not accessible
Access is denied

Owner is that name of my account where I keep all my school files,

personal photos, music, and an endless quantity of important personal

information that I would really don't want to lose. I don't really care

if I have to format my C drive as long as I can recuperate this

valuable data. So, I basically either would like to recuperate my data

in the My Documents folder (owner) or be able to boot again into

Windows on my C drive.

I was thinking that perhaps I could install Linux and try to access my

files from there. What do you think? Does anyone have any suggesstions?

Any help or advise would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a lot for reading (and hopefully helping).....