Toshiba Satellite will not start up upon shut down

[mayprecious]

Hello to all :)
HELP PLEASE!
Toshiba Laptop p200-17c will not start up upon shutdown.
It will appear to be loading vista but it will only restart itself after the cursor appears in the centre of the black screen.
I've tried going in the boot menu to see if it's a problem there, everything seems normal. I've tried going in safe mode but it does the same thing, just restarts itself after a bit.
I don't know what to do!
It says in some forums that I need a new hard disk drive!
Is there anything else I can do or try?
I don't want to lose all my data!
Thanks so much..
hope to hear from someone soon!

[Paul Komski]

Hi and Welcome.I don't want to lose all my data!
Since this sounds like a priority then consider backing it up now. This could be done by removing the hard drive and accessing it from another PC or by obtaining another hard drive (or enough flash memory or DVDs etc) and copying the data via USB using a Linux Live CD or similar bootable utility.

There is a link in my sig about using Knoppix to do this but there are other approaches that include a full image backup of the whole hard drive itself or simply a clone of the whole drive (as long as the new drive is as big or bigger than the current one). Let us know what further help you might need.

Once your data is safe use F8 during startup and you should find some Vista Repair options. These vary from system and system and version to version so let us know if none the wiser.