circlingvultures Posted June 7, 2009 Share Posted June 7, 2009 Computer has never given me trouble. I shut it off last night and today it will power up and ask for my password, then say welcome and then the screen goes black with only the cursor on it. Any help would be great. Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
benc Posted June 7, 2009 Share Posted June 7, 2009 Computer has never given me trouble. I shut it off last night and today it will power up and ask for my password, then say welcome and then the screen goes black with only the cursor on it. Any help would be great. Thanks. Computer/operating system? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
circlingvultures Posted June 7, 2009 Author Share Posted June 7, 2009 Hp g60-230/vista Maybe 3 months old. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mattstrike Posted June 7, 2009 Share Posted June 7, 2009 Uhm, to me it sounds like you may have to re-install the OS. I don't know if it's analogous, but what you're describing is similar to what happened to me - on a MacIntel running Parallels w/ XP running. This is probably a waste of typing, but I commiserate with you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Just Another Tom Posted June 7, 2009 Share Posted June 7, 2009 Before you re-install the OS, do you have a Vista disc? If so, run a repair installation rather than a format installation and it should fix it. If you didn't get a disc with your laptop, don't worry, i know HP sometimes have a repair installation from HD. When you boot up your laptop press f11 and it should enter the repair mode, and will will either repair the problem or roll back to the last known good configuration. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
circlingvultures Posted June 7, 2009 Author Share Posted June 7, 2009 ok on the hp site it says an the fan will turn on and a bliking led will indicate the problem, but no led blinks. upon reboot it takes me to a screen where i can chose to boot in safe or regular mode. i chose reg and it takes me to my log in screen. at what point do i hit f11? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thomas Posted June 7, 2009 Share Posted June 7, 2009 As soon as you see the bios screen. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
circlingvultures Posted June 7, 2009 Author Share Posted June 7, 2009 ok so i went to reboot it again and it randomly just worked this time. So thanks to everyone for the help. Normally when one of our photo kiosks at work crashes (windows) it gives me the screen to press f11. The laptop did not. Anyway, thanks again guys. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mattstrike Posted June 7, 2009 Share Posted June 7, 2009 Before you re-install the OS, do you have a Vista disc? If so, run a repair installation rather than a format installation and it should fix it. If you didn't get a disc with your laptop, don't worry, i know HP sometimes have a repair installation from HD. When you boot up your laptop press f11 and it should enter the repair mode, and will will either repair the problem or roll back to the last known good configuration. hahaha! I totally blanked out on doing disc repairs first… Don't hire me for customer service! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Just Another Tom Posted June 7, 2009 Share Posted June 7, 2009 As soon as you see the bios screen. This. Pretty much as soon as you turn it on. Bear in mind that this is the same as putting in a Windows boot disc. If you do a formatted install you will loose everything on your computer. If you can get to another computer i would recommend you burning a Live CD so that you can back up files to an ext. HD before you do anything. Ubuntu is a Linux package that i personal use for a live CD, and the Hirons Ultimate Boot CD is pretty good also. I can provide links/torrents if you need them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
circlingvultures Posted June 7, 2009 Author Share Posted June 7, 2009 mine didnt come with a disc but it said i could make a copy of one. I should probably do that eh? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Just Another Tom Posted June 7, 2009 Share Posted June 7, 2009 ok so i went to reboot it again and it randomly just worked this time. So thanks to everyone for the help. Normally when one of our photo kiosks at work crashes (windows) it gives me the screen to press f11. The laptop did not. Anyway, thanks again guys. Ah ok buddy, you must of posted this while i was typing out my last reply. No worries dude, drop a message if it happens again and i will give you a hand. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thomas Posted June 7, 2009 Share Posted June 7, 2009 An Alternative to making a live cd, is you can pull your HDD out and put it in an external enclosure and pull the files off of it with another pc if the structure of the hdd is not corrupted. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Just Another Tom Posted June 7, 2009 Share Posted June 7, 2009 mine didnt come with a disc but it said i could make a copy of one. I should probably do that eh? Yeah it wouldn't do any harm, but it's not essential. there are usually ways around it. It would definitely help. From what i have experienced you can burn a Windows CD from the f11 option. or you can burn recover discs. The recovery disc will return your computer to factory settings so there is a good chance you would loose everything. It is only the Windows disc that will let you do a repair. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
circlingvultures Posted June 7, 2009 Author Share Posted June 7, 2009 you guys give me some hope! I have a project I've been meaning to tackle. I have a compaq PC that i bought years and years ago. It was a trooper but i got really sick of the internet and the pc itself crashing so i just unplugged it and left it in a box for two years. Now after two years of being computerless, I bought this and yadda, yadda. I tried to boot that old PC up and i dont remember what happened but it didnt work. It may have even have been a monitor issue. Anyway hopefully in an hour or so i can plug it all in and try and let you guys know. my object is this. I have hundreds of pictures of my first niece from the day of birth til the day i unplugged my computer, many of wish i never burned or printed for family and i would LOVE to get these back. Any interest in possibly helping me with that? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tommytumult Posted June 8, 2009 Share Posted June 8, 2009 If you wind up being able to boot that old machine and can get into windows, it'd be as easy as setting up sharing and hooking both computers up to a router, hub, or switch. If windows won't boot becaused something's mucked up pretty badly, it'll take a little more work. You could download any Linux livecd and either burn it to cd or put it on a thumb drive using unetbootin. If you go the thumb drive route, you'll want one with multiple gigs, as the linux OS will take up around 1GB on its own and you'll probably want to have some space on it for your pictures. Once you've booted into Linux, open a terminal window and type "sudo fdisk -l" without the quotes(that's a lowercase L, by the way). That command lists all your hard drive partitions on that system. You want to find the one that's listed as HPFS/NTFS. Get the device name from that line, something /dev/sda1 or /dev/hda1 or something. Armed with that information, while still in the terminal, type: cd ~ mkdir mnt sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 ./mnt with the /dev/sda1 part being the device name from the fdisk command above. You've now mounted your windows hard drive and should be able to navigate through it using the file manager by going to the /mnt directory. Find where your pictures are and copy them onto a thumb drive. Yeah, kinda convoluted, so hopefully you can boot and get into windows on that old machine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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