Windows Black Screen Error

Dear 4chan BBS I need your help. Recently I had was doing some late night surfing on Youtube.com but it froze  on me so I had to force shut it down by depressing the power button on my Dell fro 10 seconds. However, today when I booted up this, the BIOS (with the Dell logo above it) booted up fine but then when the Windows was going to boot up, on a black screen this is what the message said:

"We appologize for the inconvenience, but Windows did not start successfully. A recent hardware or software change might have caused this.

It your computer stopped responding, restarted unexpectedly, or was automaticlly shutdown to protect your files and folder, choose last known good configuration to revet to the most recent settings that worked.

If a previous start up attempt was interrupted due to a power failure or because the powe or reset button was pressed, or if you aren't sure what caused the problem choose start windows normally

SAFE MODE
SAFE MORE WITH NETWORKING
SAFE MORE WITH COMMAND PROMPT
LAST KNOWN GOOD CONFIGURATION (YOURE MOST RECENT SETTING THAT WORKED)
START WINDOWS NORAMLLY

Use the up and down arrow keys to move the highlight to your choice"

That's the message that I have recieved, so far I've tried all the opitions and either one of two things will happen, either:

A) Automaticlly reboot and get back to the same screen
-or-
B) I will see the Window logo and the bar loading but soon after it will revert to the same screen.


Please note the following:

A) I CANNOT AFFORD TO LOSING ANY OF THE INFORMATION ON THE HARD DRIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
B) I did not install ANY new hardware or software.
C) I'm still new to computer lingo so keep the lingo simple for me (a simple guy :D)

D)To prevent future problems, what is a good brand of back up hard drives?

1) Download a Linux LiveCD such as Ubuntu or Knoppix.  It will almost always be an .iso file.

2) Burn the iso to a CD.

3) With the CD in the drive, reboot your computer.  If it still tries to load Windows, you'll need to change the boot order in your CMOS.  You can usually get to the CMOS settings by pressing delete, F1, F10, F12, or escape as the machine boots (before it gets to OS stuff).  Those seem to be the most common.

4) Once Linux is loaded, you may notice that the NTFS partition is already loaded.  From there it should be self expainatory.  Most LiveCDs now automatically handle disk mounting, so there shouldn't be anything that really needs explaining.  If you run into trouble, fire up a webbrowser from the LiveCD and Google it.

Oh, and I guess I should say that Linux has a different naming scheme for hard disks than Windows.  Whatever disk is booted (in this case the CD), becomes root (/).  On that disk is a directory called dev (/dev) which contains all the device files.  (In Linux, everything is a file, monitors, disks, mice, etc)  The first PATA disk on the first PATA controller is hda (/dev/hda), the second PATA disk on the first controller is hdb (/dev/hdb), the first PATA disk on the second controller is hdc (/dev/hdc) and so on.  SATA disks start at sda (/dev/sda).  The first partition hda is the file /dev/hda1, the second partition is /dev/hda2 and so on.  If you try to read or write to, say, /dev/hda or /dev/hda1, you'd be accessing raw blocks.  Not very useful.  In order to access files, you must first mount it.  In a terminal, entering the command "mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows" (without quotes) will make the contents of hda1 available in the directory /mnt/windows.  So if there was a directory called win32 on hda1, it would be accessable at /mnt/windows/win32.  To see what is mounted, enter the following in a terminal (without quotes): "df -h".  To see what disks are available to mount, type "fdisk -l".  USB and firewire disks count as SATA and start at sda.

But yeah, most LiveCDs will take care of disks automagically now.