Laptops F**ked, can you help?

[Santino-C]

Hi, my sister handed me her laptop yesterday asking if i could help. I know very little about what to do so i thought i would see if anyone could help.

The laptop is a HP Presario V5000 running XP. When i turn it on it just keeps showing me the black screen that you get giving you the options Safe Mode, Safe Mode with Networking, last known good config etc. When i select one of these it seems to attempt to start but the just cuts out and comes black to that screen.
Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

[StephenDon24]

Could be anything. If its not blue screening then could be more software than hardware.

Try reinstalling Windows (if its an HP it may have a recovery partition - or disks). If you can't get to Windows in safe mode not much else you can try.

[Dizturbed]

any errors show up?

sounds like it may not be able to find the os installation, happened me a bit ago.

get an xp install cd, go to the recovery console by hitting r when you finally get the option, not the automated system recovery.

its should ask you to pick an installation, will be something like c:\windows , may ask you for a password.

and use bootcfg to to get it sorted, just typing bootcfg will give you the usage of it, try bootcfg \rebuild.

this may or may not work but without knowing more details all i can think of at the moment.

ask your sister what did she do with it recently, find out what may have caused it.

[evilsatan]

If the above comments don't work, does a blue screen even flash on before it reboots? Keep pressing F8 during boot up and you should get a similar menu to the safe mode one but there will be an option called disable automatic reboot upon system failure, or something like that. Select it and hit enter, this will prevent the computer rebooting if there is an error so you can read the error report and get the code to search in google for a solution.

[Santino-C]

Thanks for the responses, i tryed the F8 option and it gave me the error code 0x00000024, after using google i got some software to use but i dont know how get it on a computer that will not even start up. If anyone knows my next step i would appreciate it, i do know a guy that would sort it for a fee but id rather do it myself even though wen it come to the workings of a computer im a retard.

[evilsatan]

Did you try the XP installation disk recovery? A CHKDSK can sort errors like this. Alternatively you can connect the HDD as a slave in a computer to access it and either get data off then format it or maybe some software can repair it as a slave drive.

I havn't looked what the error code stands for so there may be a easy fix for you, my points are just general options you have in these cases. The good thing is you now know whats causing the problem and can get ideas from google on how to fix.

[Dizturbed]

0x24 is got to do with reading from the HD, do as above and you should be able to get it sorted.

[jonnie32]

Press the power button to turn on the Laptop, and press F11 on the keyboard immediately while the computer is starting up. The HP Backup and Recovery Manager window will appear Click Advanced options , select the System recovery option, and then click Next .If the Recovery Manager can access the hard drive it displays a prompt to backup up user files before continuing the recovery.You may either backup your files, or skip the backup and recover the operating system.If the Recovery Manager cannot access the hard drive to fix the system errors, use the set of Recovery disks that you created to recover the hard drive to its original condition.After the hard drive is returned to its original condition, restart the Laptop and allow the Laptop to run all the setup programs.

Good luck m8

[danthescan]

Good luck m8

He will need it if its still not fixed,but i think after 5 months he will have binned it.