My computer kicked the bucket last night! Dunno what's wrong with it like. The initial startup screen comes up but instead of loading windows it just comes up with a blank screen! The lights on the keyboard work. The light on the optical mouse comes on. It ain't the monitor because the intital boot screen comes up. It just seems to go blank at the point when the windows loading screen thingy comes up. Ideas?
try booting into safe mode, choose 'last know good boot' (or something similary worded) from the boot menu. Press F8 as soon as you turn it on, after the memory check bit, but b4 any windows boot screen come - if they do - you've missed the bit
If you still have probs after trying F8, whack your hard drive (as a slave) into another pc and see if the drive is accessible. If it's not you've got probs. If it is, run a virus check on it. Then make sure hidden and system files are viewable, and open the boot.ini on the root of the problem drive. At the last line, after it says '/fastdetect' type ' /safeboot /bootlog' without the apostrophes, save and close. Then whack it back in your pc, turn it on, access the BIOS (by pressing esc or F2 or DEL or whatever it is on yours), and have a look to see if the drive is detectable on the primary IDE channel. It should say summinck along the lines of "maxtor 123-l" or whatever your HD is called. If it says "h2gt324ofy8en34 8ty384hf" or similar then your HD is shot. If it's not there, try to auto-detect it. If it's still not there, your HD or the IDE cable (or poss the mobo IDE connector) is shot. Anyways, restart and see if Windows boots. If still nothing or it only partially boots, put it in the other pc and see what the bootlog.txt file says (if anything) and google it. If that yields nowt, try a repair of XP using your windows cd. If it restores XP, then restarts and still nowt - your hard drives boot sectors are fucked. You can either then use your HD as a slave, or you can create an extra bootable partition, so all is not lost.
