Black Screen on eMachine

[corndale]

My friend has a eMachine Celeron 1.80 with Windows XP Home.  The computer was working fine.  Recently, he had a problem with scratchy sound when playing CDs.  In his attempt to correct the problem, he initiated System Restore.  Now the computer boots to the Safe Mode selection screen.  When Safe Mode is selected, the boot process proceeds as normal until the desktop appears.  The desktop is completely black, with Safe Mode displayed in the four corners.  Only the mouse pointer is active.  Cannot initiate any commands with the keyboard, including the Windows Start key.  No icons, taskbar, quich launch bar or system tray display.  The same happens when Start Windows Normally is selected.  In that case, the Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition screen appears as normal.  The screen then goes completely black, with only the mouse pointer active.  Clicking the mouse, left or right, produces no action after either a Safe Mode or Normal boot.  The eMachine came with 2 Restore CDs instead of a Windows XP Home Installation CD.  The Restore CDs are of no help since they only operate in a Windows environment.  I tried using a Win ME Start Up disk to load the CD drivers an attempt to access the Restore CD with no success.  I also created an MS DOS boot disk in Windows XP on another computer.  Booting with that disk provides no help as well.  At this point, I am out of ideas.  Has anyone had this problem and found a solution?

[dl65]

corndale...I had a similar situation with our son's pc 2 weeks ago .......he had been doing something and the result was exactly what you describe....What I did was to remove his hard drive and put it into one of my pcs as a slave , get into his drive and copy all his pics and important files onto a cd ........Then I simply formatted his machine and re-installed Win XP pro .......I'm sure thats not what you wanted to hear, but thats what I had to do .

dl65  

[kaplan]

Hi,

Sad to say, but it sounds like there is a problem with the MBR(Master Boot Record) on your friends PC. Normally, if you can boot to safe mode, use the commands chkdsk/f and chkdsk/r so that the next time
your reboot, the PC will fix whatever is wrong on the hard drive. But in your case, if you can't even get it to work in the Safe mode, I hate to tell you that you might have to reformat the HD and reinstall the OS all over again. By the way, if you can get a hold of a original Windows OS, use that instead of the eMachine disk(s).

K