Serious Computer Problem(BSOD?) may be reward

My computer had been working recently and i opened up(it was very dusty and there were large dust clumps, which i tried to clean out) to check how much ram was in. I saw both ram slots had ram in and i took them out to look at the label to see how much they were for and then i put them back in and the computer started fine, a couple hours later it installed windows updates(which I think might be the problem not the ram) and I had to restart it and when it turned back on the loading screen had changed to a globe and the word "dell" above itin blue and then took me too a screen that said something like Keyboard--------Detected
Usb Mouse-------Enabled
Press "del" to continue
I did so and it looked like it was working fine when all of a sudden I got blue screen of death. But it was different it said "unmountable boot disk volume"
I googled that on this computer that im using to post this and they said to put in a windows cd and run chkdsk /p but when i tried to boot to disk it said

to boot to cd press any key...
and nothing happened when i pressed keys so i restarted booted to the main hdd and got a prompt to go into safe mode, so i tryed to go into safe mode but then i got the regular blue screen of death again then i tryed to boot regularly same problem. Also When i opened it there was a grey cord with a black end not plugged into anything. it is a dell dimension 2100 (extremely old) Also if it is an unsolvable problem, I really wanna try and rescue the hard drive files, I heard about a SATA/IDE to USB adapter and may get one to see if i can use the HDD as a external hard drive to recover the files

 

What operating system are you using?

 

you probably just need to do a fresh install of the opertaing system, if you have an external harddrive plug it in and use a bootable linux cd to copie the files you want over to the harddrive then do a new install.

 

im in xp, i really just need a way to get files off the hard driv ecan you explain what you mean more in depth w3st side or give me a link?

 

Try to get into your BIOS by tapping F12 (or some F key) at startup and then putting your CD/DVD drive to the top for boot priority. Then try the Windows CD or, if that fails, a Ubuntu LiveCD + a USB stick for saving stuff; hopefully it won't prompt you to press any key since it didn't work before.

EDIT: http://www.ubuntu.com/GetUbuntu/download - for the LiveCD bit, download the 32-bit desktop edition of Ubuntu, burn it to a CD and go straight into a LiveCD session and transfer stuff off the Windows drive to a USB stick.

Putting drive in another computer, copying stuff over and formatting is the last resort I guess.