Hi there, my system always crashes and drops dead during startup, just as the auto-startup items start going in the background. I am then unable to do a single thing on the computer. After a while, I will then get the blue screen of death advising me to press any key and hope for the best.. which incidentally never happened. I'd then shut the computer down using the On button on the CPU, encounter ScanDisk, which gets stuck at the same point (6%) for a really long time and then inform me that it has trouble reading data. Is there any way out of this? I can't do a single thing these days.. Thanks.

OK, let's approach this intelligently. Can you get it to come up in DOS? Try hitting the F8 key while it is booting, repeatedly. You should get the menu where you can select Safe mode or boot to DOS prompt. Pick the DOS option. When you get there, type in scandisk, and let it fix whatever it finds. The DOS version is a good bit more robust than the Windows version, and sometimes can find and fix these problems. It sounds like some part of your drive is messed up. This may allow you to get it up and running long enough to save whatever you need and then reformat and reinstall Windows. Let us know what results you get.

I suggest booting from a floppy and type scandisk c: /surface It will check the complete surface of your hard drive and (hopefully) fix any problems. By 'fix' I mean mark any bad spots as unuseable.