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