ubuntu karmic wont boot (after update maybe)

[waba]

hello,
i have a feeling i updated ubuntu with their usual updates, but now it wont boot...what happens is it gets past the white logo screen, then goes to a black screen where the cursor flashes...and then freezes. the cursor freezes, as does the keboard.

im not very good with ubunutu, so any advice, please take it slowly with me!!!

i dual boot with windows xp, and have dual monitors on an ati 4770 card.

thansk!!

[linuxman94]

When the grub menu comes up, scroll down and select an a different entry but NOT a recovery mode. Ubuntu should boot normally.

[waba]

hey, thanks but that didnt work - i have three previous versions in the grub menu and all freeze at exactly the same point - no sometimes i get an I/O error coming up. I had a similar problem a while back, when updating my graphics card drivers - it corrupted something or the other, but that time my windows partition messed up and started showing I/0 errors. (i think there was a problem with recognising both screens).

when i go to recovery mode, then click on resume normal boot, it says
rc-sysinit start/running, process 1377

then seems to pause for a while........

[waba]

the problem is with the hard drive, with I/O errors, although i was surprised that i couldnt boot off the livecd while the harddrive was still attached. its a sata harddrive, was going to start pulling stuff off it, have booted up on the live cd - would it be ok for me to now plug the harddrive back into the sata plug so that i can mount it? or would it be a bad idea to do that. i want to get all the info off it! also, is there a way i couldd get my user settings off it, e.g firefox passwords and bookmarks, same for chrome, layout of desktop etc?