It gives an option to start in various stages of safe mode, the last good configuration, or to start windows normally. None of the options work.
Safe mode starts a long string of what looks like DOS file names, and then does nothing, leaving the screen filled with file windows file names, but no command prompt and no keyboard response.
Last good configuration and start windows normally both lead to a blank, black screen.
I can get into the bios menu before the computer attempts to start windows without a problem.
What is the most likely issue here? Also, I lost the software in the original packaging, but the computer runs windows xp home, and I have another copy of windows XP home that I bought for my desktop. The original laptop windows activation code is on a sticker on the back of the laptop, so would there be any copyright or technical issues that would prevent me from trying to boot up with the XP home cd I bought for my desktop, but using the activation code from my laptop?
It probably won’t work. The product key on the back of your laptop is for an OEM copy of XP, which will not work on a retail version of XP. I don’t know why, but I have tried this with several different computer manufacturers, and it has yet to work. It always says the product key is invalid.
How attached are you to the data on your laptop? Because if you don’t have anything on it you can’t replace or don’t care if it’s lost, there’s a good bet your drive has a restore or recovery partition on it which you can access to–as the name suggests–restore your laptop- to the way you got it or recover from certain types of OS problems. How you access this partition depends on which brand of computer you have. IIRC, Dell laptops access this by pressing F10 at bootup.
I’m quite attached to the info on the hard drive. Is there an easy way to access the information on the drive so I can transfer it to the desktop before I try your suggestion?
The notebook is a HP Pavillion ZV6000, if that makes a difference.
Be aware that before you start fiddling with the OS data structures it will be much easier to get your data off now. Assuming the file structures are intact you can remove the notebook drive and use a 2.5 to 3.5 IDE adapter (about $ 15) to boot the drive as a slave in a desktop system and remove the data you want. After that just blow the drive partitions out, format and re-install a working OS.