Well, I figured out today that the problem with my laptop is a dead hard-disk drive. It’s been booting intermittantly on me for the past few weeks, getting to the stage where for the past few days it’s not really been booting at all. Got a loan of a similar machine this morning and tried the disk from that machine in mine, and it worked perfect, then I tried my disk in that machine and it didn’t work at all!

I’m getting my hands on a new HDD soon, just hoping that I’ll be able to get all the data from my disk safely.