I would say an external HDD would be the best bet due to the amount of data. As far as Dos, you can using a boot disk. XP itself has only a dos shell/emulator and thus you can not boot to command prompt, however you can use a emergency boot disk to get to dos and go that route (again, good luck on that... you'll be copying for days). Since you can get to safemode, though, that should be good enough. Also, how long are you able to stay in safe mode? If you can stay in safe mode indefinatley you should be able to save the system. Try pulling the PCI Bus and have the system reinstall all devices, also check for splats (especially the disk controllers!!! sounds like a generic controller, but who knows), and if nothing else, once you back up all your stuff, try removing go back. Trust me, GoBack and XP do NOT get along. There is a different version of it (using wildfile or roxio version??) that is supposed to address issues with XP and GoBack. Anyway, if you decide to format, uninstall goback and fixmbr and see what that does. I have the feeling GoBack is a corrupted. Kind of give you an idea on GoBack. Not sure if your familiar with the MBR but at the end ROM BIOS bootstrap routine, the first physical layer/sector of the HDD is read. This is known as the MBR. It contains partition table info, etc. Tells where in the partition is bootable. ONLY about 1/4 of this is the boot settings. So fdisk /mbr never TOUCHES the boot settings, only the first 450bytes or so. As GoBack writes itself into this (called the goback MBR, oddly enough), if it is corrupted then it wont boot, and if it does it will be VERY unstable. This is why I think GoBack MAY be the issue. fdisk /mbr rewrties this area with zeroes. But do this only as an alternative to format, as it can sometimes be hazardous to information. Later!