Win XP won't start - pleas help!!

[unclelonghair]

After my PC crashed I rebooted it, and now it won't boot at all.
Gets past the BIOS screen, picks up the SATA drive, then just hangs on a grey screen with no disk activity.

I tried booting it with my Windows CD, installed the SATA drivers and once it starts to load it stops with a REGISTRY_ERROR

Technical Information STOP: 0x00000051 (0x00000001, 0xE1225FB60, 0x00708000, 0x000001D6)

Anyone got any ideas? Is it likely to be a borked hard drive? If I replace the Hard Drive with a new one am I likely to be able to recover any data from the old one?

Set up is Abit AV8/Athlon XP3200, 1 GB Ram and the hard drive in question is a 160Gb WD SATA drive.

Any help gratefully received before I tear my hair out - and there's a lot of hair to tear!!)

Thanks

 

[unclelonghair]

There is data on there that I'd like to recover if possible, but if I can't I'll chalk it down to experience. If there is any chance of recovering what's on it I'll buy another drive to install Windows on then copy the stuff across.

I can't even get to reinstall Windows on this drive as it gives that error as soon as you try and install.

Just wondering if there is anything else I can try before I have to dig the credit card out...