i have a gateway that is about 7 years old, running windows XP. last night computer was running fine, then i opened a document in MSWord, it was open for two seconds and then the system froze. even my wireless internet adapter's flashing green light stopped flashing. tried ctrl alt delete and nothing happened, shut off by holding power for a few seconds. on restart only gets as far as opening Gateway screen with little green bar that loads at the bottom. green bar gets a little past halfway then stops and does nothing. i removed the hard drive and attached to another computer to do virus scan, no virus found, can browse most of hard drive contents but can't get into my username documents folder, get the message 'access denied' nothing was password protected when everything worked. can anyone tell me what's going on and if there is any way to retrieve my files?

Try this for getting the info off of your drive. You can take ownership of the files(I think) on the other computer.
How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP

Also how much free space is left on this hard drive?

it crossed my mind that i had filled up the drive, but there are a little more than 5gigs free. I will give the ownership thing a shot and let you know how it goes.

I would try and backup some of that data and free some space up on the HDD.Or delete old unused data.

Try this:CCleaner - Home

Try a deframenat and do a disk cleanup,click start all programs,accessories admin,disk cleanup.Check all box,s

ownership of folder worked to backup files, so thank you for that. any ideas on what caused this issue? something in the motherboard? I'm defragmenting the drive now, and then will try it all again. if i can't load windows i guess my last option is to format the drive and start over.

This could be caused by a few things,hard to say realy.Could just be as simple as a full HDD and a crash caused a corruption.Maybe you had a slight infection and it was cured by running the scans.

Or maybe if we had full error codes they usaly help.

You can set first boot in BIOS to CD rom put in OS disk and run either a reapir or recovery