I'm in way over my head but here we go
History : I had a previous malware/virus that would mess up my internet explorer browser. I (foolishly) went to the regedit to try to rememdy the situation (which worked). The shell files(i'll go into more detail if anyone is interested)

Problem was that my normal window browser would crash, and usually had trouble restarting, so that i had to use my task manager to restart explorer.exe

Now, the worse thing is that i restarted my computer. It would go to the actually load my background for a split second, then automatically restart. I've checked my hardware and there isn't any overheating. Now i'm stuck in a loop. Even a bootdisk doesn't help me. I tried safe mode and it will auto-restart at the same point.

Now i'm getting a new comp, but there are still some files in the computer that won't load that I would want back.

so what are my options ?

If i were to install windows XP, could i then access my harddrive and eventually copy my files?

Take out the harddrive and.... well i don't know what to do.

THANKS in advance, i'm in a pretty bad spot since my comp died during my finals week.

I would suggest connecting your old HD to your new machine as slave. Then pick the files you want to save and copy them to the new HD.

After you have done this you can format the old HD and either keep it as a backup storage drive or re-install it on the old machine and re-install 2K.

best of luck Frank :