Laptop crashed after bombardment of error messages. Cpu? Hard drive?

[endezeichen]

I was watching a streaming movie (related to the problem or not I don't know) when the movie started lagging horribly. I opened up to see running processes and there was some randomly named process with the cpu running at about 80% cpu. I could only assume it was a virus so I ended the process. Two minutes later or so I had a barrage of error boxes pop up behind my active window (couldn't really read them) and then windows detected a hard drive issue. It attempted to fix and then crashed. Now, the laptop will turn on but all it will do is put up a "lesser black" screen for a second or two and that is it but will stay on. Also, I can only hear very little hard drive activity. Now, although I did get a hard drive malfunction error I would think I would at least get SOMETHING...."insert disk" maybe access to bios? But nothing. Could this be a burnt CPU? If it were something else like the hd or video card I'd at least be able to get to bios right?

 

[bjsm]

Might be a burned MoBo...

 

[wolfram23]

Not sure about the error messages and stuff, but my girlfriend's last laptop started doing the old "black screen at boot" issue after only a couple years. Seems like a fairly common issue, I would guess mostly related to over heating.

The problem is it is very tough to diagnose a laptop since you can't exactly open it up.