Dave
I had a friend who had the same on their Christmas Present, a Melidon (SP?) which I put the disk into their sisters laptop and pulled off his info before they took it back under warrantee. If they don't have their info off the disk then I have had success using an external USB 2.5" disk caddy to copy off other laptop info.
Can you get into the BIOS ok? Will it boot of a CD ? This will eliminate some issues, ie memory and cpu
I would volunteer but I'm very busy ATM and with older laptops its not economically viable to repair them. I know its only 2 years old in this instance.
Regards
Keith