Vista won't boot at all

Hello guys, so today I started up my computer and it booted fine, I even opened up firefox and browsed for a bit. All of a sudden later the entire computer freezes up and the entire taskbar disappears. Since the entire computer is frozen all I could do was manual shutdown by pressing the power button.

But when I try to power on again, after the bios screen appears, nothing appears anymore, no Vista loading screen. All that appears after the bios screen is just a blinking underscore at the top left of the computer.

I thought I could fix this by reinstalling Vista so I went into the BIOS and changed boot order to prioritize the setup disk. However, even the setup disk doesn't load. I let the laptop sit for awhile and eventually it says "windows is loading the files" but after it is finished, it just sits with black screen again.


I tried doing a hard drive test in the BIOS but it says that it failed....

 

BUMP: Anyone?

 

Since the hard drive test indicates a failure your HD may have died. I would purchase a SATA USB enclosure and install your laptop HD in it. Plug the USB enclosure into another computer and see if you can read from the HD. If not, then the HD is probably dead.

Or, if you have a desktop computer with SATA HD's you could internally connect your laptop HD to your desktop and see if you can read from it. The SATA connectors in your desktop will interface with your laptop HD.

 

what he said

 

You can run Linux without a harddrive, then test your hard drive for bad sectors with fsck.

Knoppix is a good choice.

 

If the hard drive fails a simple BIOS check then it is dead. Time to get a replacement drive.