Laptop boot issues

[Jester1013]

A friend of mine is having trouble with her laptop. When she starts it up it goes to a black screen with a flashing _ (most likely the OS boot screen?) I asked her to try unplugging it and removing the battery then holding down the power button but that hasnt worked. She cant seem to find the BIOS menu key on her initial start screen and I am not there to help. I told her to try f8 or f2 but those havent worked. I can't think of anything else to try, any ideas?

Edit: Shes got an Asus (not sure of the model) running windows 7. Im not sure how much help this is but on her initial start up screen it says Republic gamers?

 

[janas19]

Every computer has an option to get to the BIOS menu in the boot screen. It's either called "BIOS" or "Setup" or even "System Recovery."

Don't know what caused it to boot to black screen but BIOS needs to be reset to default.

 

[janas19]

Edit: Shes got an Asus (not sure of the model) running windows 7. Im not sure how much help this is but on her initial start up screen it says Republic gamers?

If that's all she sees in the boot screen, tell her to try "spamming" (rapidly tapping) the Delete button on her keyboard when it boots up. If that doesn't work, tell her to do try it with F1.

Sounds like you will have to help her . Get the OEM manual, it makes things a lot easier.

 

[frozentundra123456]

My grandson has an asus, and we tried to do a restore from the restore disk because he was having a lot of software issues. Even with the recovery CD in the drive, it booted directly to Windows or hung up while loading windows. It did not show any screens on boot telling how to get into the Bios or boot menu. We finally got the comp working again by booting to "last known good configuration", but I have never seen a computer that did not give options on start-up on how to enter the bios or boot menus.

I later looked it up on the internet, and it seems F1 gives the boot menu, but since the comp was working I did not try it. Very frustrating. I thought with the recovery CD in the drive it should automatically boot to that.

 

[Matt1970]

The blinking curser is it not being able to find a bootable device. Could be as simple as a bois setting got fubar'd or it could be as bad as a bad hard drive.

frozentundra123456, it ewill only boot to the DVD automatically if it is set to check the DVD before the hard drive for a bootable device.

 

[Charlie98]

Both my Dell laptops use F12 to enter the BIOS... and you have to be quick! ...the screen is only present for about 1 second.