Ok so...My computor is pretty well screwed. All started when I tried to download a cheat patch type thing so I could play 'diner dash' for free and not have to pay for it. the second I clicked yes on this cheat/patch thing I knew it was bad, since it did not ask me where I wanted to put the file. It just went on its merry way pouring all its evil onto my comp. I ran an AVG scan but it never found anything so I didn't really worry about it. but over the past week my computor has been going waaayyy down hill. It started will millions of pop ups and freezing my computor every hour'ish. Now after a week of this, my computor wont actually boot up anymore, it always freezes. I tried starting it up in safe mode, But it freezes before the Windows XP screen ever comes up. I know that I need to format my drive, but I have family pictures on my computor from the last year and was too dumb to back them up and I really dont want to loose them. Can someone pleaseee help me, any suggestion as to how I could even get my computor to turn on for even an hour I could get what I need.

Thankyou sooo very very much to anyone who responds to this thread.

You could slave the drive in another computer to extract the data.

You could also try a Repair Install of XP which will not format the drive but will reload all the XP files.

Your data should remain intact.

A good guide here:

http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm