Computer won't boot. Possible corrupted OS or what?

[S Freud]

I have a Toshiba harman/kardon satellite that won't boot past the initial Toshiba start screen. After this screen it just goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner and sits there. When I try to push anything it just gives a loud beep. I have tried to boot into safe mode by pressing F8 during start up but it won't boot into safe mode. I can press the F2 and F12 keys and boot into the setup utility and the boot manager but thats all it will do and I can't get anything done from there.

Any suggestions on what to do? I should mention that I am trying to save anything I can on the hard drive and don't want to lose all of the pictures/documents/information stored on there.

If anyone can help I would greatly appreciate it. I am desperate at this point.

Thanks!

 

[fastamdman]

Is there a cd in the drive? If you go into the bios do you see the hard drive?

 

[jackofalltrades]

use a live cd and see if the hard drive is visable.

 

[MAL315c]

I've seen similar situations where it was looking to the usb ports to boot and then it would fail. Make sure the hard drive is set to boot first in the bios and it's not trying to use the usb ports to boot off a memory key or external hard drive.

 

[S Freud]

How could I access the BIOS to check all of the above things? When I access the boot manager the HD seems to be displaying.

 

[Motorheader]

So when you press any key you get a beep? If that is the case has something been spilled on it or was it dropped?

Is it Vista or Win7 based operating system?

Are you not able to get Safe Mode to come up via the menu choice or it won't even start even in safe mode? If the menu choice doesn't come up to choose safe mode then at system boot hold the left shift key - this will bypass the menu and attempt a safe mode boot automatically.

Do you have a version of your operating system on CD/DVD that you can boot from? Does the Toshiba boot menu allow for system diagnostic/repair when you press f12? You may be able to run a chkdsk on the drive if there is an error in a file(s) or on the drive that the OS keeps getting stuck on.