Startup Repair issue. Is my laptop history?

Hi all, I'd really appreciate any and all information anyone has that might lead me to a solution to this problem.

I own a Toshiba mini NB255 with the Windows 7 Starter that came packaged with it. I was clicking through some files, hit the escape key and it completely froze up. The cursor locked, control alt delete yielded nothing, closing the laptop wouldn't even put it in sleep mode, it just stayed on the screen it was on when it froze. I'm no computer genius so I did what I thought was the only available option and held down the power to force a shut down. When I rebooted my laptop it went past the Toshiba screen, and then it goes to Startup Repair and tells me it's attempting to fix problems and it may take a few minutes. Well I let it sit for 2 hours and it just stays on the Startup Repair screen appearing like it's doing something, but obviously something is very wrong.

This laptop is pretty vital to me, I'm a college student, and if someone could help me out of this jam or even just tell me I need a new system I'd be forever grateful.

Slight problem. My netbook has no CD drive and I didn't feel shelling out a lot for an external drive was necessary. I'm really regretting skimping on features for price now.

Thank you very much kind sir. I'm in Massachusetts USA btw. That link you posted seems like exactly what I am capable of doing right now. Is there any way to avoid erasing all the data on my hard drive, or a way of recovering it? Because losing all my data would reaaallllyy suck.