Computer wont start?

i downloaded avast and after downloading it my computer crashed. it wont start my windows i tried starting it on safe mode but it just turns off. nothing has worked my labtop came with xp when i bought it so i dont have the xp cd. is there any way i can fix it without losing all my data.

Computer wont start?free antivirus

by a second hand hard drive and master it with XP then slave your old hard drive to see if u can access it

then copy files to master then reformat the old hard drive

http://myspace.com/50462903

i use hard drives like floppies

Computer wont start?internet

well if you cant boot ur harddrive the only solution is to reformat it but if you dont want to lose any data. If some one you knw has a bootable portable harddive, you can try booting off that and then backing everything up or use linux live cd and then burning ur data on cd/dvd (only works if you have 2 drives).
you should probably call best buy or circuit city and see what they can do
To be honest.. if you are having that much trouble just getting into safe-mode.. might be time to bring it to a computer shop.

I'm sure some people could walk you through how to boot your computer on a floppy then try to investigate or diagnose the problem... but it would take a long time and I doubt most people will do this for free.
Well since your laptop came with windows xp on the machine, chances are, there is a recovery partition, you may try going to that recovery partition and seeing if you can just reload windows, without reformatting the drive.

If you reload without reformatting you wouldn't necessarily lose any data, your apps may not work because they'd have to be reinstalled, but the data should be there.

Otherwise, you may want to get some sort of data recovery application, or create a backup image of your hard drive. Take that backup image then you can do a re-format and do the recovery of your OS and then copy over the data from the backup image.