Tried to repair my touch pad on laptop and now won't boot up

[tomup]

So, I know I've done a retarded thing I'm just hoping I can fix it. The touch pad on my laptop seemed to be not working because it was loose and falling into the keyboard. So, I powered everything thing down and took out the battery. I unscrewed the back and very carefully remove the bottom and fixed the position of the touch pad with some tape to keep it from falling through the keyboard. I carefully put everything back and started it up. It goes to the Windows XP Home Ed. load screen but then it won't boot up. It gives me the error message "sorry for the inconveince...blahblahblah....start in safe mode, network boot, boot in DOS, keep last settings, or start windows normally." I've chosen each one of those modes but it just won't bootup...it just restarts with the same messages. The one thing I notice is when I chose safe mode and dos mode I saw a bunch of drivers scroll down the screen. Have I completely messed things up or can I save my important research that is trapped on the hard drive. I know could probably try to reinstall windows xp. But if I do that, will I lose all my important data? Any suggestions are desperately needed. I appreciate your time. Thanks...PEACE.

 

[HoLoCroN]

Sounds rough...

her is a question, if you boot the laptop with a boot disk does it get you to a dos prompt?

If so, you can copy your data to a removable drive (ZIP, JAZ etc.)