Vista won't start

[Psych]

I have a laptop with Vista Home Premium, and it won't start up properly after some "Autologon failure". My laptop blue screens right after the simple loading screen with the moving green bars. I've tried using the Startup Repair tools, and none of them work.

I've decided I'm going to reinstall Vista. I have the installation disk and everything, but I need to retrieve some data from my hard drive before doing so. What tools do I need to be able to boot up the computer (not necessarily into Windows), access the NTFS drives, and copy files over into a USB drive?

Also, I want the hard drive to be completely reformatted prior to reinstallation just to make sure everything starts from fresh. I haven't reinstalled before, so will Vista do that automatically or what?

 

[Psych]

Copying things over from a non-bootable system is a pretty standard procedure, isn't it?

 

[jmwpom3]

Actually no. It's not.

I found a utility disk once that helped me out of a few jams. Search for "Eddie Maintenance" on google or something. I think they charge $5 or so for the program but it allowed me to pull a windows key w/o booting up and should allow you to do what you're asking unless it's a hardware issue.

No gaurantees, but that program has saved me some really big headaches.

Up to you.

 

[dfuze]

You could try booting from a linux live CD such as Ubuntu and once there you could copy all your files to a thumb drive.