Laptop will not boot

[Jester73440]

my brother's lap top will not boot. it gets to the XP screen flashes blue and restarts. I tried booting in safe and it did the same. It is an old laptop and i am not to worried about having to format.

my main question is how can i salvage some of the things off the hard drive? a few years ago I had an unbootable hard drive and I put it in an external enclosure and used a program to extract some of the files. is this the only way to do it? being it is a laptop I'd like to avoid taking it apart

 

[brady]

Well it doesn't really sound like it's 100% the drive, almost sounds like a video issue to me.

If you need the data, just take the drive out now, place in an external case and see if it's usable via USB or whatever. Then we can test the hardware that's failing.

 

[KSoD]

You could use a Linux LiveCD, you could use the drive as a external, you could jsut put it in your other PC. there are many ways to get the data off. It is just which option is best for you.

But you say it flashes a BSoD before it restarts. Can you get into Safe Mode? I wouldnt say it is a video problem as that is the BSoD that flashes. Just need to know what the code is to be of any help.