XP starts to boot up .... then nothing!

[mark42]

Can anyone help?

My pc has been working fine, today tried to start it up. It went
through the initial boot up process of "HP" screen, it then goes
straight to the F10 options without prompting, then "Windows XP" screen
and then when it normally goes through to the blue "welcome" screen
instead it screen goes black leaving only the white mouse pointer/arrow
visible (which can be moved about). Have tried re-booting in safe mode,
it does the same but has "safe mode" in all four corners of the
otherwise black screen.

The only disc I have is the Works Suite, I have no other discs (didn't
think to make recovery discs until I read this site!).

Any thoughts much appreciated.

 

[Rock]

Can anyone help?

My pc has been working fine, today tried to start it up. It went
through the initial boot up process of "HP" screen, it then goes
straight to the F10 options without prompting, then "Windows XP" screen
and then when it normally goes through to the blue "welcome" screen
instead it screen goes black leaving only the white mouse pointer/arrow
visible (which can be moved about). Have tried re-booting in safe mode,
it does the same but has "safe mode" in all four corners of the
otherwise black screen.

The only disc I have is the Works Suite, I have no other discs (didn't
think to make recovery discs until I read this site!).

Any thoughts much appreciated.

Have you tried Last Known Good Configuration? If that doesn't work, not
much you can do without an installation CD or a recovery CD. If the
system didn't come with a recovery CD then it should have a hidden
partition on it that can be used to restore the computer to the state it
was in when you got it. Check the manual or the computer's tech support
for how to do this. Unfortunately you'll loose all that was on the
drive. Hopefully you have backups.

If you can borrow someone else's installation CD you can uses the
recovery console to try some things. Any installation CD, not a
recovery one should do. There are several possibilities:

How to install and use the Recovery Console in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=307654

Computer stops responding with a black screen when you start Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=314503

Windows XP logon screen does not appear and the computer continuously
restarts
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=310396

How to Recover from a Corrupted Registry that Prevents Windows XP from
Starting:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=307545

How to Troubleshoot Registry Corruption Issues
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=822705

If you don't have a backup, but have two CD drives one option is to
download a linux distro called Knoppix on another computer. This
installs on a CD and boots from it. Once booted use the backup up
program K3b to backup essential data.

The other option is to put the drive as a slave drive in another w2k or
XP computer and copy off the data. Then do a recovery using the hidden
partition.