hi and thanks for your help.
after runniong malwarebytes and not finding any malware, i shut down for the
evening. the next morning, i restarted only to end up with a generic host 32
window pop up. but by desktop came up and all looked fine. i clicked on a
folder and a word doc appeared, but then everything froze. after some time it
was apparent that nothing was going to happen, so i shut down. since then the
system has been in a constant cycle of rebooting. i have also made mulitiple
attempts to get into any safe mode option, but the computer still reboots. i
have learned that there are some viruses that cause this problem, but i have
also learned that this could mean the drive has also gone bad. i run xp, sp3,
64bit. what are my options and can i ever get into my hd again to extract
data? the o/s i run is an oem, so there is no recovery console or repair
available as an option.