Black screen with blinking cursor

[Thedarkside]

I have a HP pavilion a6130n desktop that only displays a black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner when you turn the machine on. Not sure if there have been any changes to the computer recently as it is not actually mine.

I can get into the bios fine but when i try to boot into safe mode i am unable to bring up the advanced boot option menu, i have tryed the F8 and F11 keys mulitple times with no luck. I have also tryed disconnecting the media drive on it because it says to do so on HP's website when doing a system restore. Right after the HP post screen (think thats what it is) it just goes black.

Any ideas why the black screen with cursor? or why i am not able to get into the advanced boot options?

Thanks in advance for any help

 

[stoneys-nutz]

Hello Thedarkside,
If you have a Vista disk, follow this tutorial.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/91467-startup-repair.html

If you don't have a Vista disk, follow this tutorial, then go to the above.

How to Make a Windows Vista Repair Disk If You Don’t Have One - How-To Geek

You will need to go in to the Bios and change the boot order to boot from CD/DVD, as the first device in the boot order.

Hope this helps, good luck and post your results.

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Vista Forums also has an excellent tutorial on how to create a recovery disk, at the link below.


How to Create a Vista Recovery Disc

 

[Thedarkside]

Thanks for the replies and tutorials. I tryed to do a startup repair but Unfortunately when i switched the boot priority to cd-rom and tryed to boot i got the same black screen with the cursor.

I was starting to think the HD was bad but now im not sure, shouldnt i be able to boot from cd-rom even if the HD was bad?

Anyways thanks again for the replies, if i figure out what it is ill post what i find.