windows xp black screen - desperate!

rich2

Distinguished
Jul 19, 2005
1
0
18,510
I was in Quicken and got an hour glass, which never went away, and I could not change programs or soft boot, so I cold booted. Got "checking file system on c:" message upon reboot, let it alone, but no progress bar or hard drive light action. So I cold booted, bypassed file check, and pc gave me a black screen with an active white mouse pointer.

I used Norton go back and tried several restore points, went thru the above sequence, with the same results.

Any ideas? I would go into safe mode, but I forgot how, and I don't see any boot up "software" screens.

Desperate -- thank you for any help.

Rich.
 

riser

Illustrious
You can enter safe mode by holding down Ctrl or using F8 to bring up the prompt.

Get in there and post back.. at that point you might want to run a checkdisk/scandisk.