Dad’s laptop – Fujitsu Siemens from about 5 years ago has gone on the blink – it’s not booting up.

Turn it on and all looks well, then you get a black screen with white text that starts

‘We apologize for the inconvenience but Windows did not start successfully’
There’s a bit more to suggest why it’s not starting and a couple of options to choose from
Safe Mode
Safe mode with networking
Safe mode with command promt
Last known configuration and
Sart windows normally

Whichever you choose you get the Windows XP banner and the look that all is loading ok (well, i guess so – I’m a mac user….), then it falls over and you get the Fujitsui banner -> black screen / white text again…

Any thoughts would be appreciated – especially those that don’t involve replacing it….

Cheers in advance
Chris

You could put the windows CD in, boot from that, then select repair. HDD might be on the way out.

Cheers Nick – pretty sure he doe not have ay of the original disks – i’ll have a ride over to his place and see what i can find….

Scandisk would be the first port of call.

Get to a recovery console prompt, as per the above. If you don’t have the XP disc, I’ve built a disc image with just the recovery console on it, email me and I’ll send you the link (also, anyone else who wants it – dead useful).

From the console, it’s CHKDSK /P (from memory, yell if that doesn’t work).