Blank screen with mouse pointer - help

[Paladin2011]

Help. My son's computer is giving me no small amount of grief today. The system would not boot, said OS is missing and went to "Start Recovery". We allowed it to do this repair/recovery twice and system seemed to start again, but all that we have is the mouse arrow on a blank screen. I had to reset the hard drive to 1st boot device in the bios. System rebooted, but still blank screen with mouse pointer. Any thoughts?

 

[Outlander_04]

can you try starting it in safe mode

what OS does it use?

 

[Paladin2011]

I just tried to start in safe mode, but same result. It is Vista. As far as the components, I would have to spend some time looking for the list.

 

[tsnor]

Google the hot key to get into the BIOS for your PC. See if the video works in the BIOS. If so you have driver / operating system problems. If the video does not work in BIOS then you have possible MB, possible video card, possible bios settings problems, possible PSU problem, etc.. Post more details after you try to get into BIOS.

 

[Paladin2011]

Thanks, we will work on it tonight. We did see a box asking for system drivers, we put the system cd-rom in but it did not do anything. Funny thing is we are about to build him a new system. The old one is nearly 6 years old and was fine for a pre-teen, not so good for a teenager. We may not worry about it, we will pull the hard drive to get at his school work.

 

[tsnor]

The hard drive may be an IDE hard drive if the system is old enough. IDE is a wide, flat ribbon cable attached tot eh drive instead of a narrow SATA connecter (wikipedia has photos)

IF you have an IDE hard drive so you should look at a USB adapter for IDE to get the data. Many (most?) modern motherboards no longer include IDE ports.

 

[Paladin2011]

I do know that it is a sata drive. But thanks for the info.