[chensiak]

My PC was running fine for a while and today for some reason when I turned it on it would not boot windows. It is stuck on a black screen (after the sony Vaio Logo appears) that only has a flashing white underscore on it. I can not hit F8 for safe mode and I have tried re-installing windows. When i boot off my disk it spins the disk for a little while and then stops and shows a black screen without loading the disk at all. I have checked the disk on other computers and it is in working condition. I can not get past this black screen and I am running out of things to do. Please help

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First thing I'd try is resetting the BIOS to factory defaults then try booting from the CD again.

If that didn't work, I'd next try disconnecting the hard drive and try booting from the CD again. If it works now, replace the hard drive.

If it still doesn't work, try different (compatible) RAM.

If it still refuses to boot we're down to a bad motherboard, CPU, or possibly a flaky PSU.

Let us know what you find out ...

[SpywareDr]

First thing I'd try is resetting the BIOS to factory defaults then try booting from the CD again.

If that didn't work, I'd next try disconnecting the hard drive and try booting from the CD again. If it works now, replace the hard drive.

If it still doesn't work, try different (compatible) RAM.

If it still refuses to boot we're down to a bad motherboard, CPU, or possibly a flaky PSU.

Let us know what you find out ...

[chensiak]

I reset the BIOS and that didn't work. I then disconnected my Hard drive. The windows XP CD worked when i Did. So maybe new hard drive? How much are hard drives these days? nothing fancy like a solid state hard drive but just a 300 GB Hard drive.

[chensiak]

This is a link to my current hard drive http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822152022

I just need to know a compatible hard drive (under 100 dollars preferably)

[SpywareDr]

320GB, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 7200RPM, 16MB cache, 3 year limited warranty HDs are just under $50 ... with free shipping:
http://www.newegg.co...archResult=True

But, add ~$35 to that ($85) and you can get roughly three times the storage space, (1TB), with a 32MB cache, also with free shipping:
http://www.newegg.co...archResult=True