Black screen on bootup, no text, and it's stuck. Woopie!

So, in 2012, I built a machine of my own for gaming and digital art. It's a decent rig:

Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
GPU: GeForce GTX 560 Ti FPB (Fermi) 1GB
CPU: Intel Core i5-2500 Sandy Bridge Quad-Core 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost)
HDD: Western Digital WD Blue WD5000AAKX 500GB 7200 RPM
RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB)

From it's original, first, virgin bootup, it never showed me bios or anything. No white text, no fun splash screens... It would just be a black screen for a minute or so, then my Windows 7 desktop. I thought little of this, since I typically keep my machine running as it is practically always in use. Little more than an annoyance until about a month ago.

I had a windows update. I am foolish and never turned off auto update. So, when I went to restart my computer, I got the black screen... For a long time. After two days I figured, perhaps my machine is just being rude and updating windows, and I can't see it. Lo and behold, after a few hours when I prodded the mouse, the computer popped up with my desktop as if waking up from sleep mode.

Now, I have the same symptoms again, except I have allowed my machine to run for a solid 12 hours with no avail. It seems to boot: I get a single beep as per normal, the LED's light up, and the red one flickers to show that my machine is processing. Abnormal is that the num, caps and scroll lock lights flash not once, as per normal, but once, num lock stays solid, then they flash again, all go out, and then another flash whence the num lock stays solid again, as if it's restarting. After this sequence, which seems abnormal, the LED's go to the standard 'standby' colors I would have during normal, casual computer use (internet surfing and the like).

I've tried navigating, blind, to windows safe mode. I have either failed, or it has no effect. I can't know which, because there is no input in the monitor. I know that the computer is sending a signal of some sort, but it seems to be just a black screen. This is tested with three separate monitors and has always been consistent with simply not showing me the boot-up process.

I'm looking for either a solve to the boot-up taking a seemingly endless amount of time, or some thoughts on why it doesn't show me the bios/windows update progress. Unfortunately, simply reinstalling windows isn't an option: I have artwork I have to save, so it's a last ditch choice. Worst case scenario I could slave it to a friends computer and get the art, but my friends are loathe to do this for various reasons.

I'm sorry for the wall of text but i figured being specific would help.