Originally Posted by Chip-3Door
As its a desktop, if you can find someone local to you who is fairly IT literate then whacking your hard disk in their machine to copy all your pictures off would be my first port of call given that by the sounds of it the pictures matter to you FAR more than getting the PC working does, so I would sort that first, then have a go at fixing the PC afterwards.
Providing naturally that it's not come from Dell, Time or HP etc, where they often protect the hard drive content, therefore when you try and access the drive in a seperate machine it comes up with the "access denied" box
