I've got an HTPC (ASRock ION) and the HDD drive (or one of them anyway) has been making a bit of an unusual noise for a while.

Now when I boot up I get the BIOS screen, then the 'Starting Windows' icon, then just a cursor and a black screen. Tried in Safe Mode, no difference.

Any idea where I go from here?

Not something I am too up to speed on, but if it was me I would take the HHD out of the machine, connect it as a slave on a 2nd PC and then use that to recover the files on the original HDD.

Sounds like Windows is goosed.

As above back up all your docs and then try to fix the problem.

Yeah - gonna do that tonight - it's actually got two HDD's in now, all my movies are on the second HDD, so I'll get that put in my big PC anyway so I don't loose anything.