Are you sure you pressed F8 at the right time? You should definitely be able to boot into safe mode as sim03 suggested and that sounds like the best hope at this point. Just start pressing it as soon as your PC reboots, dont wait for the Windows display to appear.
It's always harder to try and fix a computer you're not sitting in front of. I think your best bet is to take it to a local computer shop and see what they have to say. From what you are saying they should be able to recover all your important data and throw it onto a new drive. Good luck CO.
OK! I did wait too long for F8. Got into safe mode. Thanks! One more question from an idiot. I don't seem to be able to access the internet in safe mode. Is that normal or do I have more problems? By the way, I'm on my other computer, in case the wise guys were wondering. I do appreciate the help
I just fixed the blank screen problem (destroyed the old pc in process tho) any way, -it could be the video card problem, try to install a second video card and hook up your monitor from there, - it could be software/video drive problem, replace your current hard drive with a new hard drive, load the OS, boost from the new hard drive and copy the data you want over or try to re-install your old video drive into your old hard drive from the new hard drive
As I recall there are different options for safe mode, one is safe mode with networking but the default may not have any networking (thus no internet) so it is normal, nothing to be concerned with. The whole point of safe mode is to fix the configuration issue (whatever you changed that caused the mess) then reboot back into normal mode and hopefully the problem is fixed. You shouldnt leave your machine running in safe mode.
OMG! I got lucky. I did a system restore from safe mode and VIOLA, it's all good. System resotre did not work from the task manager. Don't know why. You guys have been a real help. Thank you very much. I still don't know what I did to fck this up in the first palce. At this point, I'll just leave it be. Thanks again!!
If you get one of the non microsoft windows shells, you then can run programs and copy files , at least then you can get a backup of the hard disk. This happened to us and that is how we created a hard disk backup before we had to reformat. You need to start up windows at a command prompt so you can install the shell. I don't remember which shell we used but it was one of the ones from PC magazine site or something like that.