cant boot cant repair, cant reinstall... can i recover my files??
 

not sure where else to pose this question. but the other day my linux box stopped booting up. it will not go past the step that says "finding info file" i have tried to run the repair installation option on the system discs, but i cant even get it to boot that far. is there any way to overcome this and at least get it to boot long enough to copy my music and my other files on to my laptop (running vista)?

please help.
(if possible explain this to me in non-technical-terms.)

The thing to do is get any of the many "Live CD" Linux distros. (I'm assuming you don't already have a live CD.)

Boot up from a live CD, and you should be able to access the hard drive, copy files, etc.

If it will not boot from CD, then that may be a hardware issue.

Try alternate boot devices: can the computer boot from floppy or USB? Maybe from network, if it is/can be connected to other computers?

Remove hard drive and copy files onto another computer: Open up the box, pluck out the hard drive. Then either open up another computer and place the hard drive inside it, or get an external enclosure for the hard drive, which usually can be connected to another computer via USB or firewire.

ok so i downloaded the live eval for my suse distro (9.3) and i get the following errors
hda: task in intr: status 0x51 (driveredy seekcomplete error)
0x04 (drive status error)
ide opcode was: unknown
ide0 reset: successful
hda; lost interupt
(several times)
(repeat)

Bad Drive or Disk Controller (Motherboard)
 

I would have to say that it looks like your hard drive has went bad, but it could also be a disk controller problem on the motherboard. If I could not get the drive to boot on one machine, but I had another that worked, I might move the drive to the other machine as a slave drive and see if it could be mounted under a different copy of Linux. You could also consider buying another compatible hard drive and see if it works on the same computer that will not boot. That could tell you if the computer is at fault or if the drive is the problem. Sometime bad partitions can be present and with the loss of data, a reformat might get the drive back. Even a new drive cable might get you working if the older cable has been used and abused a lot. However, the base problems looks like a bad drive to me, something that does happen over time with older computers.

Thank You,