windows loading/start up problems

When I turn on my Acer Aspire 6920G all goes well with post but then when it tries to load into windows vista home premium I get a screen that reads "Windows Vista Home Premium, Please Wait screen and it seems to load but then screen goes black and won't go anywhere after that. now I tried to get into system recovery to restore to a previous restore point by using the F8 and chooi=sing repair and system recovery options but get same result both ways. Now having a background in computers and some troubleshooting experience I even tried botting in with Linux Knoppix Bootable DVD 7.0.5 system won't boot from cd even after I change the BIOS settings to boot from CD/DVD first and pressed F10 to save the changes made to BIOS. Can anyone tell me how I can back up the info on my hard drive as there is documents, pictures, videos, etc... that I don't have back ups of a particular relative that has passed away approx 1 year ago. I would really appreciate any help on how to access this without loosing them as they are special to me.