My PC Crashed... HELPPP!!!
 

So just prior to my vacation my PC crashed. I let it sit and hoped two weeks vacations would do it well but it didn't lol.

Basically it boots, I get the windows loading screen with the blue bar going from left to right... it stays at that and it won't load any further, no matter how long I wait.

When I reboot I can choose Safe Mode as well, but if I do it will load the components and stop there, similar to normal mode. When I put in the Windows CD to reinstall it also goes up to a certain point and just stops. So no matter what I do I never get near the actual interface or a way to fix it.

What can I do? Will I be able to recover at least some data from my HD? Can I fix the computer?

Running Windows XP on a HP 2.6ghz, tried to remove memory slots and switch them hoping that might trigger something but it didn't.

hm, I had similar experience with one of my PCs, what I did was I installed XP (on top of the XP I had) in a different folder, and then it started booting just fine

also if you can't fix it and your HD is ok, then you can recover all your data, mount it on another PC as a second HD and you should be able to read from it

I can't even get anything installed. It stops no matter which option I choose.

hm, could be hardware problem too - open the PC and see if your CPU fan spins all the time, if it does then remove all the components that you can - graphic card, network adapter etc, and try again

what he said. :)

Maybe try to boot a linux live cd. If it works it is quite improbable that it is a hardware problem.

Your data should be save, as long as your harddrive is not defective. Just don't mess it up while trying to reinstall Windows.

Your memory could be bad