Gave my old pc to my son, had not gotten around to backing up my picture files yet.  Well he tells me its not working, after some investigation I find out that instead of shutting down the pc properly each time, he simply has been unplugging it.  I mean, every time bless his cotton socks no matter how much I have always drilled into his 10yr old brain this is a bad thing to do.  Before I RESTORE it, which of course will wipe my files is there any way to rescue my pictures?If the PC will no longer boot, you could try that hard drive in another MACHINE.  it will then show up as an additional drive, and you should be able to get your pictures from it.
Hope this helps, and welcome to the forum.It's one of those all in the monitor media machines, you cannot access the hard drive.  Yes, not my wisest of purchases but unfortunately all I can get to is the memory.  It does not seem to recognise the C drive in DOS either so I am guessing this means the drive was never formatted.If you can't access the drive, you could take it to a computer shop where they will be able to rescue your pictures for a fee.
There are some other ways you could try but it can get quite technical - not to do you down but you did list your experience as Beginner, so I'm only going on that.Well after much investigation on the web I found the information I needed.  Just went into Dos and at C prompt typed in CHKDSK.  This picked up the errors.  Rebooted SYSTEM and no more loop in and out of the 'their has been an error loading XP' screen with the various options it has all loaded properly .  now you need to find a way to make your son shut down properly!