Left my PC on overnight last night because I was downloading some stuff.

Came down in the morning and there was this weird error regarding "google updater" and it was requesting I send info to MS for review. I kept choosing no, but it popped up every 20 minutes or so.

I notice google is getting laggier as the day goes on and eventually when I search something and click the link I am automatically redirected to some ad-site, some marketplace thing and occasionally a virus scanning adware site.

It even blocked my access to any anti-spyware site. I installed hijackthis but can't do anything with the logfiles so it is useless, I also installed one called spyblaster, then restarted.

Now the goddamn thing won't even start, I am hanging on a black screen just after the windows "loading" image--I can't get in.

Normally this would piss me off enough to just reformat but there is stuff on here that I cannot lose.

Can anyone please help me figure out what the hell to do?

Update: Now I can't even access it in safemode. It gets to the windows account choice screen, I click my account--restarts computer.

I've had it hanging on the post-windows-loading image black screen w/hourglass phase of the boot up for over an hour now.

Is there anyway I can use a bootable distro and access files on my windows drive?

This is ridiculous.

I can't even boot into safe CMD PROMPT mode.

the ubuntu live CD should be able to see your hard drive so you can get the data you need off of it.

do you have any way to hook that hard drive up to another computer as a secondary drive or an enclosure you can put it into to plug it into another computer through USB?

Ubuntu is my first chance at it, I am on a booted copy right now.

It recognizes the drive, but won't "mount" it. I am too linux-stupid to figure out how to get it to mount.

I have a friend who offered me a SATA-USB converter, but I can't get it until at least tomorrow.

Anyone know enough about the linux problem?

get a version of knoppix. you boot from cd, it does everything automatically for you to get in. find your data. copy save to disk etc.

Tried Knoppix, didn't work for some reason.

Gave me a weird boot error right in the beginning so I was stuck with a severely reduced kernel.

Bah. I'll just have to wait for tomorrow. If that sata connector doesn't work I am going to hunt down whoever wrote this spyware and murder them.

You can try using Slax to boot from as well. I've had a lot of success with it (except when using RAID arrays).

Reformatted and everything, fresh install.

Been working great, tried to install a game today--crashes every time I insert a CD.

I guess I could blame it on a bad install, but I am worried the HDD could be buggered up.