My laptop was fine yesterday then today it just froze on me and restarted. After that, it never fully loaded XP so I manualy restarted it and nothing happened. I tried to start it in safe mode, nothing happened. After a few more times, it finaly started in safe mode. At this point, I started running some diagnostic tools and then a black screen poped up saying "trouble reading from disk, press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart." I restart and it gives me a few options,

• Start in safe mode
• Start in safe mode with network
• Start with last good configuration
• Continue to windows

I tried all of them and they all seem to stall. One time I tried and I got this message, "<windows root> \system 32\ntoskrnl.exe is corrupt or not found." I tried to run my XP disk and recover it but had no luck.(Im not sure if I was even running it right)

I dont really want to reformat anything just yet because I need to get somethings off the drive first that were not backed up to my external drive.

Thats where Im at right now, anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks

hi, try this one to recover a corrupt registry in XP, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545
but if still doesn't work plug your hdd to a usb enclosure and back-up using another computer