I left my computer on the other night and the next morning it was
running a scandisk. It found a few errors and fixed them... then, it
restarted the computer. It went to a black screen that said something
like,
"Windows was not shut down properly... blah... blah... and gave me the
option to
1)restart in safe-mode
2)safe-mode (networking)
3)Using Last Windows configuration
3)Use normal windows
I tried safe-mode, and it just listed a bunch of files in dos then
stopped. So I restarted the computer. It went straight to this black
screen again. I tried, "using last configuration" and it had the
Windows xp start-up screen, then went to scan disk. It didn't find any
errors... but restarted itself after the scandisk was complete. AGain,
brought me to the black screen. This time, I selected normal windows.
Same thing... scandisk, no errors, restart, black screen.

I got out my Windows xp disk and put it in the CD Rom. I went to the
BIOS and changed the settings so it would boot from the CD. Turned off
the computer... turned it back on - same thing. It doesn't even look
like it is reading from the CD. The light comes on the drive at the
beginning (when turning the computer on)... but, that is it.

I called tech support (Dell)... I don't think they even understood my
problem.

Any suggestions would be GREAT! The big problem is that I was having
some backup issues right before this happened and didn't get my stuff
backed up - YIKES. At the very least, is there anyway I can move those
files to a floppy outside of windows? Can I get to a dos prompt when
the computer starts up??

Thanks so much!!!
Jenni