XP hangs on examining system

I cannot boot into XP home. The screen just shows a cursor. Hitting F8
does not work. When attempting to boot from the setup disk it gets as
far as windows is examining your system then hangs. A puppy linux live
cd runs okay and opens the hard drive. This seems to indicate a
windows system problem. I'm tempted to try and salvage the data from
the drive using linux and a pen drive then flatten the drive and
attempt a reinstall.

Any suggestions gratefully accepted

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