After booting it will only display the background pic for many minutes. Cannot bring anything else up.
I cannot do any scans for viruses or malware now. Did those quite recently though, they were ok.
I did a system restore which said I needed more virtual memory and it fixed that, supposedly.
I attempted to do a repair per your pinned instructions. I encountered an error message: viaide.sys corrupted. Unable to continue.
Also, BTW, to get the machine to boot from the CD I had to disable the other choices in the BIOS setup. Just bringing the CD choice to the top did not work. It still booted from the HD. (Don't know if that's relevant.)
After the repair attempt I did a defrag in safe mode (which took at least an hour) and it was unable to defrag the files from the failed repair.
Where do I start from here to see if it is salvageable? Or have I completely screwed things up?
Thanks.