Haunted hp pavillion

[zippy]

[SIZE="7"]I need some serious help!! I've been messing with this for two days and I have gotten no where. Problem..,Laptop boots up slow then gets as far, maybe as the welcome page and the mouse freezes so I cannot land on a user to click on to open system to start a serious diagnosis. Also if I do get that far the key board won’t type. At one time I did get to the page with the safe mode info but could not arrow up and down to get to last known config. By chance I open and closed the screen and the system started moving. I do not want to loose all my data. Its all messed up. Is there a short somewhere? Much Thanks![/SIZE]

[pam123]

Is your laptop still under warranty?

[zippy]

I don't think so. We got it in 2005.

[pam123]

How handy are you with notebook hardware ?
I'm thinking that either you need to reinstall XP, if you're lucky, or you may need to replace the hard drive.
Since you can't get to XP you'll need a hard drive diagnostic from the manufacturer's web site (burn to cd and boot from it to run it.)
If the drive fails, well, newegg time.
If it passes then you'll have to decide if you want get your data off the drive or just use the restore partition (or the disks you made when you got the notebook) . Instructions will be in the manual.
To get the data back you can either use a Linux live CD and a usb hard drive or you use an adapter and slave the notebook drive to your desktop.
Since you're not an "authorized" service center you would have voided any warranty, were one still existence, when you opened the case to remove the hard drive.