This is my last resort! Please help!
I installed Fedora 10 on a pc I built from a barebones package, I have had no problems over the past couple months until recently. When I start up the pc the OS lags on a black screen with the cursor blinking. I have searched forums but I guess since I am a newbie I am still lost in the translations. What I am trying to do is save my files that are on the pc to a DVD-RW or my external hard drive before I have to reinstall the software again.

My questions are as follows:
How can I locate the files on the hard drive? When I have the bootable cd-rom inserted I am unable to locate the HDD.

How can I transfer my files using the command line prompt?

Finally, is it possible just to upgrade to the latest Fedora without losing my files and going through the data recovery process head ache?
Or can I reinstall the OS and not lose my files?

Any assistance will be greatfully appreciated.

You should be able to upgrade to a newer version. But I have not done that with Fedora. I have upgraded Ubuntu Jaunty to Karmic without data loss. So it should be true to Fedora as well. But you should first try and backup your data.
You can use Live Ubuntu to boot into your machine and locate files. Once your Live Ubuntu is up, you should find your disk in Places menu. But it is assumed that your hard drive is not bad or broken. If it has hardware fault then I guess you should get it replaced.

Well chances are you will lose your data if you reinstall as the installer will format the partitions. It is possible to reinstall and not format the partition is your data provided it is currently partitioned to have your file on their own partition. I am going to assume that the drive is 1 big partition and that this is not an option.

In the event that you have your drive partitioned as 1 big partition you best option is booting from a LiveCD. I have not used Fedora since Fedora Core 3 so I am way out of date. I don't know if Fedora comes on a LiveCD or not. If it doesn't just download a copy of the Ubuntu install cd, I know it is a LiveCD.

1.) Boot from the Live CD.
2.) Create a folder to mount your hard drive to
3.) Mount your hard drive to the newly created folder. (Your hard drive will not automatically be mounted by the LiveCD unless you run an installer. You will have to manually do this. Depending on the type of hard drive the identifier may be different. Now days most home build computers use SATA hard drives which are designated as /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc. If you only have 1 hard drive and it is 1 partition then you would mount /dev/sda1.
You may also need to use the -t option and specify the file system type. I do not know what you are currently using but default I think when you install is either ext3 or ext4.

Once you have your drive mounted to the folder you can browse the folder to view the hard drive.

Another option is to run fsck on your hard drive to repair any errors on it.
**you will need root access to do all of this. I am not sure if this is given by default in a Fedora LiveCD, but in ubuntu you will put sudo before all commands. example: sudo fsck /dev/sda1