Help! Computer Screen Turns Black After Pentium Screen

[gatoinfeliz]

Hey everyone,

I'm having serious trouble with my computer. Around a month ago my hard drive failed (s.m.a.r.t. status bad) so I had it replaced and basically had my new hard drive recovered. Everything's fine until yesterday. I was downloading some music while listening to music in windows media player 10 and I had a windows explorer error (the kind that after clicking, keeps media player active even after you exit it.). I didn't think anything of it since I have gotten those with no repurcusions in the past. After a short while the computer just goes into restart mode automatically. Now it won't go past the Intel Pentium screen, or rather it goes black and then nothing happens.

I went into the bios menu and the hard drives (I have 2) are both fine, they both have good smart statuses so I don't know what the possible problem is.

After my initial disc recovery I was running XP Media Edition but updated to the server pack 2.

Also, if it comes to an issue of doing another disc recovery, if I buy a hard disc insclosure, would I be able to take my 2 hard drives and plug them into say my sister's computer to back up the data or would they be recognized as new hard discs and would I be asked to format them (essentially forcing me to erase my data)?

After doing a disc recovery on the primary disc drive (again if all else fails), would I have to do anything similar to the 2nd hard drive or would I be able to plug it in and have the files in it recognized?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Broni]

Before you start removing your HDs....
Will it boot to Safe Mode?
Do you have on-board video, or separate video card?

[gatoinfeliz]

It won't show the screen with the different modes. I have the video card on-board.

I heard about a Linux bootable system called Knoppix that could possibly work as well. Would anyone know hot to utilise it?