laptop will not start up

HELP. My laptop will no longer start up properly and ALL of my school work is on it and exam week is NEXT WEEK.

It was working fine and dandy, but then I plugged a LAN cable into it and tried to start up MSN and Firefox. Both produced errors and wouldn't work. I tried to reset, but it wouldn't, so I did a hard reset. Now, whenever Windows boots, it gets to the loading screen, but before the login screen appears my laptop resets itself! I've tried safe mode and everything I can think of. I am freaking out! Someone please help.

what do you meant by 'tried to reset' and 'hard reset'?

I mean I went and clicked "Shut Down Windows" and then "Reset", but didn't get any response. So I used to power button on my laptop to reset. I'm assuming this may have caused disk errors, maybe, or something. I don't know. But safe mode won't work, nor will a regular start up, or ANYTHING.

I'm not sure what I can do to fix this.

This probably isn't the same thing but I'll tell you about it anyway :p

Last winter my laptop would just randomly freeze up! I couldn't move the mouse or do anything...nothing happened S:

I had to hold the button down and shut it off. I turned it back on and it would do the same thing after about five minutes until finally it just wouldn't start up! The laptop was on, but the screen stayed off. We took it to the best place in town and they didn't know what was wrong with it. We ended up shipping to Kentucky to get it fixed.

They didn't tell us what was wrong with it or what they did, but it came back working perfectly. It was scratched up a bit on the outside from the trip, though.

A couple months ago I restarted my computer while ChkDsk was running and created this same problem. It would restart as soon as the XP logo popped up.

I tried a few things that didn't help me at all, and because my Finals were approaching I decided I didn't want to spend time messing with it and just left it off. Well, I turned it on about four days later, and it started working again normally. It was extremely bizarre, and I don't know how it fixed itself. But it did.

First, this has to be said. You should definitely have had a backup of your important stuff, especially important school stuff. Hard disks are fragile and mechanical devices, after all.

However, I doubt a hard-reset would have ruined your hard disk. It's probably just damaged some of the files windows need to operate properly. You could try performing a system restore, using some of the CDs you should have gotten along with the laptop, but keep in mind that this could erase your user files, which again leads to why we want a backup.

If you send in your PC for service, they'll probably charge you for taking this backup for you, before they wipe your system clean again, so it's best if you are able to do this yourself. Now that your laptop is dead, the best way to take this backup would be to insert your hard drive into a functioning computer. In this case, it needs to either be a laptop with room for two hard drives, or perhaps a regular desktop computer, but then you might need an adapter to be able to connect it. You should be able to remove the hard drive from your laptop without voiding your warranty. Or rather, the manufacturer will have no way of knowing that you removed it, as long as you put it back in place before getting it serviced.

If you do not know how to do any of these things, ask a geek at your school, someone is bound to know how to do this :p.

Oy smurfing vey! Thanks for the suggestions. Currently I'm running chkdsk from the recovery console and crossing my fingers in hopes that it will work. I know back ups are necessary, yadda yadda, but I just got the laptop recently from a friend who bought a new one, so I haven't really bothered to make any back ups yet D:

Before removing the HD if you really can't get Windows working, I suggest downloading a Knoppix or Ubuntu live CD, burn to CD, and boot from that instead - then you can copy anything important off onto a USB memory stick or something :p

I have an Ubuntu live CD, except I don't know how to view the drive because it is formatted as NTFS. Can Ubuntu read NTFS drives? I thought about installing Ubuntu and downloading a Linux NTFS reader type deal, except I can't resize the partition because Linux says it is damaged because Windows shut down improperly.

The later versions are supposed to be able to view them fine. I'm not sure how recent they need to be though.

Ugh! I think that's what I'm gonna be doing then, I guess. Chkdsk is frozen at 60%. I'm going to leave it on overnight, if that doesn't work I'm going to try the live CD again.

Will Ubuntu be able to read from a damaged NTFS partition? Because if I reset during chkdsk (no other way to stop it, :() it will probably create more damage.

There's no guarantee when it comes to reading from damaged filesystems, but I'd guess that it's not actually a filesystem issue and just a few corrupt files that Windows uses to bootstrap.

You'll probably be able to mount the drive in Linux and grab the stuff that you need.
If the FS is actually damaged and you have a later version of Ubuntu (one that includes ntfs3g or some other NTFS write-support (Hardy or Gutsy, I think)), you could even try to fix the filesystem by running "fsck.ntfs /dev/sda1". Obviously you'd replace "/dev/sda1" with the actual device.

Oi polloi. It's fixed. Repair installation of Windows (after like six million tries) worked. Although my registry was set back to nothing, so all my programs are working funny. Gorry, time to reinstall EVERYTHING. I got my school work back, and my sanity, and that's what counts.