Acer Aspire 5920G - boot problem

I was sitting by my laptop, happily playing The Sims 2, when it ran out of power and went into hibernation. I plugged in the power cable, forced it to turn off (because it always fails to wake from hibernation by itself), then turned it on again. I get a screen telling me that Windows cannot start, and I am told I should run the diagnostics tool. I do. It gets up to the Windows boot screen, then stays there, not moving on. The harddrive is making a little sound again and again.

I've also tried booting it from a Vista CD, and it does the same thing - comes up to the boot screen, then does not proceed.

What can I do? Is it likely to be a Windows issue, or is it a HDD issue?

 

try a factory reset Alt+F10 at the acer splash screen.
it should ask you what you want to do.
or did you burn the recovery DVD's ?

 

I did try the Alt+F10, but it wouldn't work - it just went right on trying to boot Windows. However, the problem has somewhat resolved itself - what I did was that I booted Knoppix Linux, which runs entirely from a CD. My initial reason for doing this was to save my personal files in case I had to send the laptop in for service. So I hooked up my external hdd and backed up all my files, then rebooted the laptop, and voila! The startup repair wizard loaded. It couldn't fix anything, it said, but after that Windows booted just fine.

I'm going to give Acer support a call anyway (I would've yesterday, but they were already closed) and ask if maybe I should do a reset back to factory defaults (I haven't made any recovery DVDs, but I read somewhere on the internet that I can do a factory default reset from the Acer eNet menu?).