black screen at system startup

hi

yesterday I was copying something from one HDD to another, then suddenly everything stopped responding. i.e. I could navigate through system, open some files but I couldn't stop copying and activity monitor wasn't responding. so I forced shutting down the system by keeping pressed POWER button for a few secs.

after that the system doesn't want to start again. at the beginning there is a black screen which says that I need to restart my computer. I tried Disk Utility, but it never helped. is there any "safe mode" in leopard (like the one in windows) which allow user to copy essential files to another HDD ? I'd like to back up my stuff and then reinstall whole system, but I'm afraid of losing data and like to copy them to another location. thanks


[ced]

Boot the machine from your Leopard install disk and run the disk utility direct from the DVD. Allow it to repair the disk and run it over again until all errors have been cleared. You might have caused file and disk errors when you
forced the system to shut down. If that doesn't work to get your system back to normal, you can re-install Leopard using an "archive install" which will preserve your user data, documents, and settings in a separate folder.

Regards.