Big problem with my system...

Computers are just great... until they stop working and then they're just fucking awful.

Anyhow, there are two machines in the house, one is my dad's and the internet pc, the other is my own for my games, work, movies and material for The Forgotten. Today I was watching a video file of footage for the upcoming Silent Hill Homecoming game and all of a sudden the computer just rebooted, I thought it had got a bit hot or something since it was a HD video and so I just waited till it started up again.

Except it didn't, it gave me the option to load safe mode with or without networking/command prompt, last known good configuration and start windows normally, it didn't matter what I clicked, nothing happened, a black screen came up and it just hanged. After several restarts I gave up, switched off all the power and left it alone for hours. Later I came back to it and all of a sudden it loaded up, with that damned 'your system has recovered from a serious error' box appearing. So I just went through my files to see if everything was ok for about 10 minutes and then boom.. a blue screen. No error message apart from the STOP (insert random characters here) at the bottom. Then, you guessed it.. it wouldn't boot up again.

My first thought was the recovery console on the XP disc, so I inserted that and waited for it to boot from the disc.. only it didn't, I checked the BIOS settings to make sure the CD-ROM was the first boot device and it was, yet it wouldn't boot from the CD, I tried a random game CD in there too and it wouldn't read it either. My thoughts are that Windows is just corrupted for some reason, as when the system did boot the data from what I could see was intact, the recovery console will probably fix it but I can't get it to work for some reason. I'll probably get it to load if I leave it again but it'll probably blue screen again if there is a real problem.

Anyone have any thoughts? I've been looking through several tech help sites, none of them offering any new ideas I haven't already tried, bar smacking the thing with a hammer that is.

PS: The Forgotten material is all backed up on several different drives along with other stuff, a good 90% of the data is safe.

[edit]It appears the disc I was using wasn't right, I got the CD to boot but it just goes to a blue screen saying press F2 to enter the ASR and when I press that it doesn't do anything...Virus?!! I haven't installed or moved any new files over recently other than stuff related to games or TF..

That's what I'm going to do next I think, my friend's hard-drive kept blue screening awhile ago and when we slaved it we found the data all intact, it's probably the same deal. I noticed upon startup that the hard-drive doesn't even make a noise anymore so you're probably right. Grrrr.

Well, the hard-drive is being read as a slave and the data is fully intact, so I've gone ahead and backed up the other files I didn't have stored before. I'll be doing a virus/spyware scan on it just in case something has crept in, I usually scan things before transferring them over but there's a slim chance something could possibly have sneaked in, we'll see.

Good news is that the TF data is 100% backed up, so nothing has been lost at all.

Turn's out that one of the RAM sticks had blown, I took two of the four out and booted it and it ran fine with dual channel. Then I swapped them around and it ran at single channel because one is obviously fucked (though the system still recognises 1024mb of RAM.. wtf?). Just need to get some new memory now I guess.

A happy ending FTW