My wife's PC suddenly stopped booting up properly. It gets as far as the Windows 'loading' screen with the bar scrolling away, but that's as far as it gets for some time, then suddenly flashes up a BSoD barely long enough to see, then the display cuts out.

We've got identical PCs, and after swapping components, I established that my PC suffers the same problem if I swap in the HDD. Even if I plug hers in as a second HDD on my machine, it still does the same thing, even though it's booting from mine. I can't even boot her machine from CD or DVD either, so I couldn't even use a recovery disc.

I did manage to partially boot my PC into safe mode with the other HDD attached, and it got as far as loading 'crcdisk.sys' and froze.

Anybody know what could be wrong with it, or at least how I can get the data off the disk? I'm assuming there's still data on the disk, given that it at least shows me the vista 'loading' screen.