How do I recover my data?

What motherboard are you running?

It is possible your board isn't supported by Windows 7 or any later versions.

It’s definitely supported, since I’ve already run Windows 7 on this machine before. To be honest, the computer is probably over a decade old now, but it's been an absolute workhorse for me. It serves as my dedicated office machine because, compared to all the flimsy tech we see these days, I still find myself trusting this old setup more than anything else. Let me grab a quick photo of what happens when I try to run this Windows XP installation.

http://i57.tinypic.com/vhstc4.jpg

My apologies to the admins for the double posting.

Terry Perez8 said:http://i57.tinypic.com/vhstc4.jpg

My apologies to the admins for the double posting.

Go ahead and perform a BIOS upgrade.

Just wanted to give you guys a quick update. I popped the case open to run some tests on the RAM, and it turns out one of my 256GB sticks is totally shot. On the bright side, I managed to boot into Safe Mode, so I'm currently in the middle of backing up all my data.

You’ll need to switch the BIOS setting from IDE to SATA in AHCI if you want to get Windows XP installed on a SATA HDD

I just finished getting a fresh installation of Windows 7 up and running. One of my RAM sticks gave out on me, so I'm sitting at 768MB for the moment, though I'll track down an extra gigabyte somewhere soon. Thankfully, all my accounting data is safe and sound.
I really wanted to extend my thanks to everyone here, because this has been such a headache over the last couple of days. If it hadn't been for Terry Perez8 pointing out that issue with my RAM, who knows how much longer I would have been struggling? 😁