suddenly can't boot up - HD issue?

[jrobo]

At midnight my AVG (free version) started running its

daily scan and I went to sleep. In the morning, I

went to my pc to power it down and noticed an error

which I should have written down exactly but it

resembles this: "Cannot create file D:\$n"

Explorer was visible and everything _looked_ fine, but

I was unable to activate "My Computer" and I also

could not reboot from Explorer... both functions

simply timed out.

I forced a power off by holding down the power button.

When I tried to reboot, I got past the BIOS but after

that windows never loaded. I observed that all the

hard drive lights were on, and the green monitor light

was on, but nothing more. I did not hear any unusual

sounds from the hard drives. I'm running XP SP2, if other details are need I can of course provide them.

If anyone has any ideas how to troubleshoot this I'd

much appreciate it!

 

[Ste]

Place Operating system disk in, boot off of it, goto install windows, it will detect a previous version, select repair install.

Oh and please don't space your sentences out so much..

 

[dipique]

He's right. You'll lose all your settings and you'll have to reinstall all your applications, but all of your files will still be in their old folders.

Dan

 

[jrobo]

Thanks, I'll try that when I get home tonight. Sorry about the spacing - that was a result of saving the text of my problem in Notepad and pasting into this forum to save time.