Hello everyone. Guess I'll start with the specs, I have a P4 3GHZ 1G RAM Dell Inspiron 9100 Laptop.
Earlier today I ran the clean up program. Everything appeared to go smoothly, the PC rebooted and that’s when the trouble began. The computer started to boot up as normal, but it soon asked me for my XP login, something it’s never done before. I entered my user ID and password, and then it took me to a black screen with nothing but the mouse arrow on the screen. I attempted to reboot several times, each time with the same end result; black screen. Next I booted up in safe mode, ran system restore, everything seemed to run properly, but when the system rebooted, I had the same problem, it asked for login only to take me to the black screen. I ran system restore again, selecting an earlier restore point, again everything seemed to run smoothly, but upon reboot still no luck; black screen.
I then took out my XP Pro CD, ran the system repair function, again everything seemed to go smoothly, but again upon reboot, the black screen. I decided I’d try booting up in safe mode again, but now I’m unable to access safe mode, either with or without command prompt. I press F8, select safe mode, get a bunch of lines of code running down the screen, and then it simply hangs with a screen full of lines of text. Well I then put the CD back in, selected the recovery console, ran ‘chkdsk /r’. Again everything seemed to run smoothly, I rebooted and again all I get is the black screen. Next I tried ‘fixboot’ and again it said fixboot was successful, but this time upon reboot, after asking me to logon and taking me to the black screen, it hangs there about 10min., then it goes to a blue screen, completely blank except for a horizontal grey box in the middle of the screen with a big red circle with a white x in the middle of the circle. After a couple more reboot attempts, the grey horizontal bar with the red circle x is all I get.

Any assistance that can be provided is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Oh yeah, I should add the very first thing I tried was booting to 'last known good configuration', the system then did a 'chkdsk' however when it was complete, the system booted up to the black screen. Thanks.

This post has been edited by rwade5: Nov 20 2005, 09:55 PM

Start the System Restore tool at a command prompt

1. Restart your computer, and keep tapping F8 during the initial start-up until you get options, select Safe Mode with a command prompt then press enter.

2. Log on to your computer with an administrator account or with an account that has administrator credentials.

3. Type the following command at a command prompt, and then press ENTER:

%systemroot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe

4. Follow the instructions that appear on the screen to restore your computer to an earlier state.

For additional information about the Safe mode with a command prompt, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315222/


A description of the Safe mode boot options in Windows XP




Look for a system checkpoint

I tried it and the system restore appeared to run successfully, but upon reboot, it asked me login again and once I logged in, it simply took me back to the black screen.