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Here's the story: tried to boot Windows (XP) yesterday. Gets past the big black screen with scrolling bar and the windows logo in the middle. Resolution changes to the normal desktop res, but before it gets to the big blue "Welcome" screen it gets stuck on a black screen with an egg timer in the middle. Never gets any further. Same result if I try Safe Mode, Last Working Settings (or whatever it's called), etc.
I was about to reinstall Windows anyway, so I thought I'd get a CD-bootable Linux distribution, boot into that, and copy the files across to a USB hard disk. I installed Knoppix, got it booted, and it simply won't show my partition. It recognises the DISK, but any attempts to mount the data give me error messages. Oh dear.