Black Screen On Laptop

lufcgirl

Hi

We've got a laptop that was working fine up until half an hour ago, it crashed and had to be reset.

Now all that appears is a black screen with a white cursor and occaisionally a blue circle appears near the cursor and then disappears.

It's an acer laptop if thats any help

Thanks

daily_2

Remove the power lead and battery, replace, and switch on.

lufcgirl

Nope, doesn't work.

The whole problem arose when installing Sim City 3000 on it, since then it's just not working on restart. Theres an option for normal or safe mode, safe mode results in the same problem except safe mode written in the four corners.

prowla

What happens if you press Ctrl-Alt-Del (ie. all three keys at the same time)?

Browntoa

does "safe mode with command prompt" work ??

if so then try a restore point by running Sytems restore from the command line

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304449

daily_2

Press F8 at boot, and select last known good configuration

lufcgirl

Browntoa wrote: »

does "safe mode with command prompt" work ??

if so then try a restore point by running Sytems restore from the command line

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304449

There is no option for this, just safe mode or normal. I'll try the F8 thing now and see...

Browntoa

otherwise it gets complicated using Linux Cd's to boot the machine and manually copy the required files over from the restore point

sounds like a driver from the gane has caused a corruption

do you have a Xp CD ??

lufcgirl

We managed to fix it with the F8 thing. It came up with an option to repair and went through it and luckily it worked.

Thanks everyone for your help, much appreciated!

daily_2

Done a backup recently?

lufcgirl

Nope it's my OH so I'm just passing on info on the phone to them. I'll certainly mention they should do one if they haven't already. I don't have a notion what was on there already so they were aware they may lose some stuff