Windows Vista wont boot

I have a Dell inspiron 1720 laptop running windows vista home. Vista froze (what a surprise) and I had to force my computer off. When I tried to restart the computer it messed up again and I did another force power off. I tried to restart it a second time and it informed me that windows had failed to start.

Now I had two options: use the startup repair or just start normally. I chose to use startup repair and it loaded the initial screen where the loading bar scrolls across the screen. That screen scrolled for about 5 seconds and then changed like the startup repair window was about to load, but nothing appeared. No blinking light or anything just a black screen. The monitor backlight was still on so I think the monitor was working its just that nothing was being displayed. After about 20 minutes of waiting I forced it off again and was again brought to the "windows has failed to start" screen. This time I chose "start windows normally" and the regular scrolling screen came up. This time it kept scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling, until after about 20 minutes I forced the poweroff again.

Now I was worried. I have tried unhooking the little watch battery on the mobo to see if it would reset something but it didn't work. I used my vista install disk to try to repair it, and it loaded all the files off of the disk and then went to the black screen again. I tried starting in kernel mode, safe mode, and the one where you go back to the last good boot setting. Still nothing. That's about everything I know how to do. I'm afraid that the boot file is corrupted and I wont be able to get all of my music, pictures, etc. off of my computer and I DONT want to lose it. If anybody out there can help me out by giving me another option I would really appreciate it. I would be happy if I could just get all of my personal files off of the hard drive.

Please help!
-Adam

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