Not starting...

Hello, and thanks ahead of time for any direction. I'm having an issue with my start-up. It gets to the "flashing cursor" then just stops and doesn't progress from that point. I did have a friend that had a "HBCD" disk "Hiren's boot disk". The disk got me running, but before I could get an external HD to copy my files, my CPU got shut off. And my friend can't find the disk now...I copied the disk to my hard drive...but I can't get it to work off of a cd...

Couple of questions: 1) would it be worth it for me to find a boot disk on say ebay, and try to get it running? Or should I just pull the hard drive and make it a slave to another on a different cpu? But the other cpu is running XP.

I just need the files on the hard drive...

Thanks!!

Try safe mode
When you first start your computer and before windows starts to load tap F8 repeatedly until it opens with the option of safe mode.
If it starts OK then you need to look at what you have starting when it loads normally
Press the Windows key and R
type msconfig
go to startup and see what programs load with the startup
then try services tab in msconfig
hide all Microsoft services and what is left
reduce as many of what is left as you can by going to start menu and type services.msc
click the service you wish to stop and go to properties, startup pull down box and make the change there