Studio 1537 won't boot successfully

Startup Repair will not work.  I was able to eventually run some diagnostics and even get it to boot in Safe Mode (which also had issues).  Now, in 'normal' mode, it goes past Dell & Microsoft screens, to white arrow on black screen (for an extended period) and then to gray screen and hangs, goes no further.

Hope to at least get it to boot to do a final backup, then will do whatever necessary to get it running again.  Any way to create a bootable disk to be run from CD (can't locate original discs right now - packed during move).