Help, computer will not boot

Mesopotania

I switch on the computer. The logon script come up, then screen goes black and fails to bring up Windows.

Can someone help please?

PaulK_3

Windows XP or Windows Vista or....
Can you hear fans etc while the screen is black? Any lights flashing on the front of the PC? Have you tried pressing F8 after the bios screen to get into the boot options screen?

Mesopotania

I have Windows XP
The fans are running while the screen is black and the green power light is on.
F8 doesn't do anything, but pressing ESC gets to a menu.
I don't know what to do from there?

mentat72

What options are on this menu?

Mesopotania

Options are;

Select a boot device
Floppy
LS120
Hard Disk
CD ROM
ZIP100
USB-FDD
USB-ZIP
USB-CDROM
Legacy LAN
NVIDIA Boot Age

DatabaseError

choose hard disk, see what happens

Mesopotania

Didn't seem to work.
I can also get into the setup menu, when pressing DEL enter.
There seems to be lots of options there, but I don't know what to select?

fwor

The setup menu that you go into with the DEL key will be the BIOS settings. Don't change any of those unless you understand what the effect will be.

It sounds like the hard disk may be corrupt, so Windows starts to load but then chokes on a mangled system file.

Do you have a Windows installation CD? If so, try booting from that. If that works there are several recovery options that you can use - for example to check the hard disk for errors by selecting Recovery Console and using the chkdsk utility.

To state the (probably) obvious, don't choose the Install option, or you may end up formatting the disk and losing all your data...