Laptop won't boot & chkdsk error

Wanna start off by saying sorry if someone has already resolved this problem on another thread but I have read many and haven't found a problem that exactly matches mine.

Ok here goes, I have a Dell Inspiron 1764 running on Windows 7 64 bit. I've had problems with this pc for months in that it suddenly lost masses of disk space and because of this I couldn't update any programs or even renew my McAfee which I guess didn't help things.
After some investigative work with help online I found that my 'My Music' and 'My Pictures' folders were located on the C drive and taking up a lot of space so I relocated these onto the D drive. This seemed to solve the problem, the C drive was clearer and everything was working fine, security checked for viruses and all seemed to be in order.

That lasted for about 4 days and then yesterday the laptop randomly crashed and then restarted and it appeared to be ok, I continued using with no problems and switched off as normal. I tried to boot on again last night only for it to hang on the Starting Windows screen, didn't even reach log in. It went to a black screen and then something else came up and asked if I wanted to Start Normally or in Safe Mode, I chose Safe Mode.

Nothing happened for a while and then it went into CHKDSK but sat at 3% for about 2 hours saying loads of files were unreadable, it finally got to 30% after 6 hours but by then it was 1 in the morning I had to manually turn the pc off.

I tried again this morning and had the same error but it automatically goes into CHKDSK, after about 5hrs it got to 55% and then went back to the Starting Windows screen, black screen and the CHKDSK again, this has happened 3 times now.

I've tried pressing F8 & F12 when first booting up and I've also inserted the Windows Installation Disk but this won't run. I gave up and switched off again, went through the same process but when it got to CHKDSK I pressed to cancel the check but it just sat there for 25mins and then asked me to choose Safe Mode etc, I choose SM again and it started to load files and has been sat at Loading Windows Files for the last 15 mins.

I'm going insane, is there any hope for this pc? It was a present about a year and a half ago which I really love so desperately want to salvage if I can.
Please help! Thank you!!!

Sounds worse than it may really be...

First, in your BIOS is SMART disk monitoring activated?

If it's not then turn it on and try running chkdsk again.

If SMART's already enabled then can you removed the HDD and slave it to another healthy PC and run chkdsk on it from there?

It's always a lot easier to do when the OS primary drive is healthy and functional :)