Hello and thanks inadvance, my nephew was pluging in his audio while his desk top was booting up. His finger hit the power button and now the unit wouldn't boot up. I've tried to go into safe mode and it gets stuck when I try to scroll up to safe mode. I've tried to do a repair with my XP home edition which is the original running system. It will ask to boot from CD, then the screen goes black after I hit enter. I do have a recovery disc, but I would like to save what I can. Any help would be nice!:o

My may have caused a spark when he plugged in the speakers while it was booting, like static electricity. It may have fried a card or something.

If the computer has a separate sound card, remove it and then try rebooting, it might solve the issue. If not you'll have to take it in, cause it seems like this computer is freezing before you can get into windows or even boot from a disk.

I can boot from the reinstall dics, but I want to save my data first. I was told to take the hard drive out and put it in another computer and copy the data than put it back and do a reinstall. Is there anybody that knows of other options before I open this computer?