Black screen after windows vista logo

Hello there! I'm having an issue with one of my windows Vista systems. It's a HP computer (blah, I know)... and is several years old. It's issue of late occurs on start-up. After attempting to "Start windows normally", the system will display the load screen then immediately go to a black screen. It doesn't restart... it just stays black. I've tried to go into Safe Mode as well as do a system restore and go to the last known good config. Nothing works. The problem is there is over 200 gb worth of work, school and personal files on this system I need to export to my external hd. After that I don't care what happens to this freakin computer.

If anyone has any advice, I would greatly appreciate it.

Edit: It's a x86 Windows Vista Home Premium OS.

Try booting from your CD and choose repair..

I have tried this but the Repair utility doesn't end up loading. It gets stuck "Searching for windows installations. I see my operating system in the Recovery options but I can't click it because the search pop-up keeps searching for other OS's. Any help?