Windows not booting

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Hey everyone, I'm new to these boards and I think I have a big problem with my PC!
A few days ago it froze and when I tried CtrlAltDel, it said 'the Task managed has been disabled by the administrator' (which I didn't do, and I'm the only person using my PC). I hit the reboot button, and just as it booted up and got the the Windows XP splash screen, it auto-rebooted. For a couple of days I was able to overcome this problem by hitting the reboot button during bootup, but now it's out of control and just continues to almost boot, reboot, etc in a constant cycle.
I knew my PC was in its death throes so I bought an external hard drive to back everything up, but now I can't even get into the PC to do that, and I'm seriously concerned as I have several years worth of vital files stored on there. Also, I'm completely computer illiterate and have no idea about any of the hardware involved.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!
 
Well, if you're super concerned about the data, you might want to bring it to a shop of sorts and have it retrieved for you.

That said, download this .iso of Knoppix on a working PC. When it completes, burn that to a CD as an image (not as data). Head into the BIOS on your broken PC and set your optical drive ahead of the HDD on the boot sequence. Attach your external HDD to the PC and toss that Knoppix CD into your optical drive and restart. It should boot off the Knoppix CD and being to load etc.

Once it's completely loaded (it'll take a few minutes, be patient), you should see the internal HDD with Windows on the desktop along with your external HDD. Browse your internal HDD and simply move the files from there to your external HDD.

If that seems too daunting, remove the problematic HDD from the PC and attach it to another PC as a Slave/Secondary drive. You should be able to browse the "broken" HDD's data via "My Computer" and then move the data from there to another storage device.
 
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