Hi!
Thank you so much for responding to my post. When I hold down the alt key to boot it up, it still comes up gray with the flashing gray question mark. At one point, doing this with the startup disc, I was able to get into the system, but that does not work anymore.
And I tried, the fsck thing today. It took me to the command line interface and I followed those very instructions. When I rebooted, the same question mark came on. Then when I tried the fsck again, it didn't show up as the command line interface and it only showed the folder with the question mark once again. It's deteriorating even more with everything I'm trying. I don't think there is anything else left to do. Beside replacing the hard drive, is there anything else I could try? I'd like to retrieve all my files I had on the hard drive.
But I do have one question? Once it showed on errors on the command line interface, what should I have done? What I did was to reboot to see if anything had change. Was that the right thing to do? Much obliged for what you've suggested!
P.S. Forgot to mention that I was still using Leopard, when the system was working.