Can't boot WinXP - stuck in a loop. Any Suggestions?

Hi everyone , could use a hand with some problems I'm having here.

It all started Wednesday, I was trying to install an IM program that for some reason wouldn't connect online properly. So I decided to restart my system as its been running for about a week (hibernates at night) thinking that could do the trick. While restarting I went afk for a min and when I came back was prompted with the apology that windows couldn't start and had the standard options of what to boot into (the 3 safe mode's, last known config, and normal). I went ahead and chose last known config as I assumed something must've went wrong with the installation, that resulted in XP loading for a few seconds before it would completely reboot back to the selection screen. I then tried safe mode to see if I can do a system restore which resulted in a reboot as well (all options resulted in a reboot).

So I am now searching for any suggestions here...I've seen many with this issue but can't find any real answers that help. One solution I see is using your XP CD to repair the OS which sounds great except I have a stock PC (HP ) which did not provide me with an XP CD and I only have the basic recovery CD's I created with there software. It appears the recovery CD would simple reformat and return everything to factory settings. This obviously is my last resort but I want to see if anyone has any suggestions on what I can do to solve this without having to reformat.

Secondly IF I have no other choice but to reformat & reinstall what's the best way for me to backup important files from my HDD? This is actually the second time in about 6 months I had to reformat as I had driver issues earlier this year which made XP unbootable . Back then I used Knoppix (old but I had it on hand ) to back everything I wanted up. But now I'm having issues with that as well, as it's not recognizing my SATA HDD so I'm planning on taking it out and connecting it to my laptop and back it up onto an external HDD in FAT. That however is giving me trouble too as it wont give me write permission and I don't know why even thou the external HDD is in FAT. So any ideas on alternative backup solutions too? I'd love to just connect it to my windows laptop and get the data like that but it's protected (just a password) and I don't know how to overcome this besides using Linux.


Thanks for any assists and suggestions you guys can give I'm really getting angry at these stupid problems.

**OS: Windows XP Media Center Edition SP3