Ran scandisk all night on hd followed by a defrag. I do not think either was successful. It only defraged upto 95%. I shut down the PC and turned it on later only to find that it did not boot up completely. Desktop did not come up. I do have recovery disks but can't use because CD-rom does not work. I do have a CD-rw drive which i have tried but no result. I do know that this drive did work. I tried safemode but after few minutes i gave up and shut the pc down. Can someone please help. Talk to me as if I was a three year old. I will not get offended. I forgot to add that it is a P4. Socrates

Socrates, I'm assuming you can boot into safe mode thru the bios. Try scandisk again from there (be aware that it may take hours to finish, overnite isn't a bad idea). Be sure you don't have a screensaver running or a scheduled task which might alter what's written on your drive or it will not be able to finish. If that runs as it should, you can defrag after. Scandisk will locate/fix errors in media if it's able. Doesn't always work, but... HTH. Ed in Texas.

Thank you for your response. I have tried booting up in safe mode but it is pretty much the same story except I will get the semi-blue screen with safe mode on all four corners. Please advise. I really appreciate your help. Socrates

Thanks to this forum I have been able to solve my own problem. I guess when I defragmented I screwed up something called the registry. I am going to guess it is the commands Bios uses to take me to the Windows porthole. Anyway if anyone is interested. This is what I did. I used the recovery disk that came with my PC to enter MS-DOS. I went to the C: drive and type: cd windows\command followed by scanreg.exe/fix. And that did it. Thanks all. Socrates