Blue screen – help needed

Mrs_pbradley936

Someone in my house has dropped a 3 year old laptop on the floor and now we have a blue screen asking for a disc. What does it mean and if I cannot find it the disc it wants is there an alternative? The reason I mention the age is because I will not spend a lot on it – would rather buy a new one.

Many thanks.

Browntoa

could have damaged the hard disk, what disk does it ask for ??

can you get it into safe mode by tapping the F8 as it boots up ??

Mrs_pbradley936

I will go and get it and come right back.

Mrs_pbradley936

Well it took me to the right screen to ask for safe mode but when I aked it to start in safe mode I just got a black screen with white letter saying
multi (o) disc (0)rddisk partition(2)\WINDOWS\sytem32\Drivers\WMILB.SYS

that is the first line and the screen in full from top to bottom with only the last bit different.

Browntoa

Boot your computer from your Windows XP Cd (or borrow one, ANY XP disk will do)

Your computer will begin to boot. Eventually, you will see a screen asking you what you would like to do. Press the letter R on your keyboard to proceed to the Windows Recovery Console

As you progress to the Recovery Console you may be asked which partition you would like to boot into. Type the number associated with the partition containing your NTFS partition (usually 1 or 2) and then press enter to continue. You may be asked for your administrator password. If you have one, type it in and press enter. If you do not have a password to boot your computer into Windows, simply press enter

Now you should be at the command prompt. Type the following command without the quotes and press enter: "chkdsk /r"

This test will take a while depending on the size of your drive. It will look for the errors on your drive and repair them. When it completes, you will be back at a command prompt

Remove the floppy disk or CD from your system and restart the PC

Mrs_pbradley936

Many thanks for your reply. I discovered that the computer was still under warranty (must have ticked the box “buy extended warranty” by mistake!) as it is just under 3 years old so I phoned Dell.

Anyway the chap took me all through umpteen tests then asked if I had a Phillips screw driver. I did and to cut a long story short it has a damaged DVD/CD Drive (because it works fine when you take it out). The are sending a new one by courier either later today or tomorrow.