Black Screen Of Death (Sad Story)

[Guest]

Alright evrybody, I am about to tell you a very sad story, about a very
foolish man. I , GhandoTang, loaded vista onto my un-partitioned hard drive.
I know, I know, Stupid but sometimes these things happen. I am now leaving
for Alaska in 4 days and am confronted by the infamous black screen of death.
My options are slim. I am running a new dell that when purchased came with
a piece of paper instead of an operating disc, I have no boot disc. I cannot
get anywhere with my computer except for the black screen. My computer does
not seem to have an option to boot from my dvd/rom inside the computer, only
a external usb cd drive or a floppy drive, neither of which I have. My
computer seems to offer a "rollback" option to start on the previous version
of windows, but when I attempt it I get nothing but a grey bar across the
bottom and a massive freeze. Safe mode freezes, dos mode freezes, diagnostic
says everythng is peachy. I attempted to boot sans video card only top
realize that no video card = no monitor. I am in full breakdown. Please,
Please help me as I am near the breaking point and love my computer very much.
-GhandoTang

 

[Tom Scales]

First, boot to the Dell logo and try both CTRL+F11 and/or F12 and see if you
can get to the restore facility to restore your machine to factory fresh.
If not, Vista hosed the boot, but the partition should still be there.

Then go to this page:

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/fixes.htm

Download the DSRFix program and put it on a bootable floppy. You can
download a bootable floppy from www.bootdisk.com

If you do not have a floppy drive, then you are going to go spend $30 to buy
a USB one. That's the cost of this mistake.

Boot to the floppy and run DSRFix.

Remove the floppy drive and boot. When you see the Dell logo, press
CTRL+F11 or F12.

Follow the instructions to restore your PC.

You WILL WIPE OUT YOUR HARD DRIVE.

That's the cost of the mistake you made, so just restore your backups when
you get your machine back.

Tom

 

[Guest]

Thank you very much Tom,
I am attempting what I can now, hopefully it will work out but if not I'll
grab the floppy drive (maybe radio shack, even though there cheapskates) when
I can. Is there any chance on me resolving the problem thats occuring with
Vista? I'm sure that if I could just get it up once, I could solve all of my
problems. Either way, I really appreciate the immediate response, good
looking out.
-GhandoTang