Is My Laptop completely Buggered ??

when you boot press F8 and choose to go into maintenance mode and not to normal mode. there in control panel or from my computer's properties go into hardware diagnostics . see if a red bannered error is present. If it doesn't give any clues and still won't boot , put in your rescue disk and boot . If you don't have that boot with your restore cd or windows cd. And choose the REPAIR option . If your data files on a partitioned D disk you are very likely to recover them . good luck .

i wonder what went wrong? i mean, how is your spyware and virus protection? when was the last time you defragged and how much free hd space do you figure you have?
without knowing more can only offer some shotgun approaches. i think your symptoms suggest that perhaps you've experienced file system corruption caused by? virus? or hard drive media failure which possibly has corrupted the registry. we really need an exact error message...
exactly what is the last thing you can read on the black screen? does it ever mention windows 2000? wonder if you are making it to boot.ini or not...how far exactly it gets in the boot helps figure out which part is messed up...
i would try using the Recovery Console to chkdsk my drive and maybe defrag it. if no joy there, i would try booting from the win2k install cd and using the Recovery Console to attempt manual repairs or Setup to attempt automated repairs.
To have Setup try a repair, you boot from the windows 2k install cd, and (gulp) pick Setup. It will take a long time you will be regretting picking Setup and kissing your data goodbye and eventually it will report it found your old windows installation and offer to repair it. say yes and that may fix you right up.
sounds like your registry got hosed. so if you have a backup in your repair folder, you could use the recovery console to replace it.

Well as you can get into BIOS you have the ability to save your data by just inserting a Linux Live CD and loading from there then dumping your files to a USB device which can be a HDD in a USB caddy or if you don't have a lot of stored data maybe even something as simple as a USB Flash Stick.

What you now need to understand is that computers are not common household products that are reliable particularly Windows based computers they are inherently unreliable and you MUST backup your CRITICAL data regularly. Sure you can get it recovered if it's absolutely necessary but wrecking a perfectly good HDD and spending up-wards of 3 K isn't worth the expense when you could have saved your data for a few hundred $ and still have the ability to continue doing it after a reload is required.

If you can not get into Safe Mode you'll have to bite the bullet and remove the HDD place it in a computer that can take more than 1 HDD or even into another NB and use a USB Caddy for your drive and then attempt to see if there is anything readable left on the drive. If there is you can take ownership of the files and copy them by following the following MS KB article

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308421

But if the dive appears blank and you have really important data on it that must be recovered the best thing would be to send it off to a specialized Data Recovery Company and pay the price. While it might be an expensive lesson it will be one well learned and you will not make the same mistake again you'll backup everything religiously to save the unnecessary expense.

Col