Hard drive?

[Lori]

My sister has a HP ZE5500 laptop (5 years old) that recently cannot go past
the safe mode options screen when the power is turned on.

She was in Internet Explorer (the only app open) walked away from the laptop
for 10 minutes, came back and had a black screen with a blinking cursor.

She could not power the laptop down or use ctrl-alt-delete. She used the
reset button.

She has not been able to get to her desktop since. I tried to help and
selected f8 to bring up the safe mode options and tried each of them. After
selecting an option, the screen freezed and I can no longer use the keyboard.

I tried the safe mode option, safe mode from command prompt, from last safe
configuration and tried selecting the normal window option (I can't remember
the menu verbatim).

Does anyone have any suggestions? The hard drive status light blinks when
the menu option is first selected and then stops. The battery is charged.

Any ideas on how to get past this point? There were no warning messages
about bad sectors or anything leading up to this.

Any ideas is greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

 

[sgopus]

Take it to a reputable repair shop and have them look at it.

 

[Andrew E.]

Boot to xp cd,recovery console,select 1 For C: Press enter key for password,
type:Fixboot Agree,type:CHKDSK C: /R When its thru,type:EXIT Let xp
start up auto.