Laptop 'cable fault'

[klinsman]

Hi,

my Irish friend Fiona is in the middle of the Amazonia area and has a problem with her laptop.
She asked me to find out what could be wrong.
She wrote:

i sat down last night and was working away, when suddenly my machine shut down. when i restarted it, it came up with a recurring message, something about "cable fault". i have a cable that comes from the computer into the(external) battery pack, and then a small cable from the battery pack into the wall. i had to get a new one of these smaller cables to suit the 2 pin type sockets here and i´ve used it in the past and its been fine. i changed back this small cable to my old one with an irish 3 pin plug on it, and plugged it into the wall via an adaptor this time. the message isn´t coming up now, but its still not booting up. now the screen is all black, with a small white horizontal line blinking in thte top left corner.

Your help is much apreciated

Jürgen

 

[KGB-911]

Windows seems to be corrupt.

You can tell her to try to remove the hard drive, then plug it back in again.

 

[kashifns]

I second to KGB-911 that windows seems to be corrupt but I never seen any message saying "Cable Fault" or might be I am missing something.

Anyway ask your friend to try booting the computer from some other media (floppy/CD).

I don't think so Plugging out and then plugging in HDD will make some difference as symptoms (Blinking cursor) is giving an idea that HDD is detected.