My wife's laptop (Sony Vaio VGN-BX540BW) suddenly refused to boot the other morning. According to her, she simply shut it down the night before and couldn't get it to boot up the next morning.
Well, I figured it shouldn't be too hard to resurrect. The hard drive is only a month or so old, having been replaced after the previous one started developing bad sectors. So the HD shouldn't be the issue. I went to boot it up, it went through the usual POST and then.... black screen with just a cursor blinking in the top left corner. Odd. I checked the BIOS and the drive shows up properly.
So I figured it might be a corrupted file. So booted into the Recovery Console and ran checkdisk. It did its thing, I rebooted and... same problem. Hmmm... Well, maybe I can do a system restore. Unfortunately, I couldn't access the regular menu to run it, so I booted back into the Recovery Console and tried to manually run it. Nope, refused to run. Command not recognized. I ran Fixmbr and fixboot, hoping that would fix any boot.ini problem. Nope, not it.
Okaaayyyy.... So I thought I would simply install windows from scratch in a separate folder, transfer her files/folders over to the new installation and then delete the previous installation. I would have to reinstall all her programs, but at least it would be working properly again. I entered the new folder name to install XP when prompted to do so. The Windows installation then proceeded properly and did its first reboot normally. As soon as it came back up, it went through the POST, got to the same place it had been hanging at previously and stopped there. Same black screen, same blinking cursor in top left corner.
So at this point, I'm a bit stumped. If anyone has any ideas to try, I would be very grateful.
Well, I figured it shouldn't be too hard to resurrect. The hard drive is only a month or so old, having been replaced after the previous one started developing bad sectors. So the HD shouldn't be the issue. I went to boot it up, it went through the usual POST and then.... black screen with just a cursor blinking in the top left corner. Odd. I checked the BIOS and the drive shows up properly.
So I figured it might be a corrupted file. So booted into the Recovery Console and ran checkdisk. It did its thing, I rebooted and... same problem. Hmmm... Well, maybe I can do a system restore. Unfortunately, I couldn't access the regular menu to run it, so I booted back into the Recovery Console and tried to manually run it. Nope, refused to run. Command not recognized. I ran Fixmbr and fixboot, hoping that would fix any boot.ini problem. Nope, not it.
Okaaayyyy.... So I thought I would simply install windows from scratch in a separate folder, transfer her files/folders over to the new installation and then delete the previous installation. I would have to reinstall all her programs, but at least it would be working properly again. I entered the new folder name to install XP when prompted to do so. The Windows installation then proceeded properly and did its first reboot normally. As soon as it came back up, it went through the POST, got to the same place it had been hanging at previously and stopped there. Same black screen, same blinking cursor in top left corner.
So at this point, I'm a bit stumped. If anyone has any ideas to try, I would be very grateful.
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