Black screen

[Redleg]

Got home from work last week Thursday, cause I had my VFW meeting that night, then the State Convention that weekend. My XP machine was working fine, I thought. Got back from the Convention late Sat night, and it appears my XP machine is now dead, or something. Not dead, it'll boot, but what I end up getting, is a black screen. It locks up (I think) right after the POST. I can't even get it to go to Safe Mode. What I'm wondering is, how can I get it to go to DOS (?), so I can reformat the hd and re-install XP on the thing? What's the format cmd to re-format the hd, so I can try and start over?
On my Vista Machine, I finally got it back online. Finally got into safe mode, and 'restored' from a date back in Mar!!! lol

Any help would be greatly appreciated,
Thanks
Redleg

[stinger608]

Just put your XP Disc in and boot from it, it will allow you to format from the install.

Of course make sure that the optical drive is the first boot device in the bios.

[screwballl]

what has been happening to all these machines... so many black screen issues lately...

[stinger608]

Originally Posted by screwballl

what has been happening to all these machines... so many black screen issues lately...

Yea, no kidding man!!!! Seems like every other day someone is having black screen issues

[Redleg]

Don't know if it's from a virus, or what, but a friend of the wife also had her computer go down with it. I was at work, so I couldn't help, but she took hers to Worst Buy, and they charged her $400 to upgrade her system, and still forgot to put in a new dialup modem. She lives out in the country, and can only get online the old dialup way.

I had to go back to a restore point on this one (Vista), to get back up. My XP system, I can't do anything with, since I ain't 'geek' enough to figure this crap out.


Thanks for the suggestion. Will give it a try later today.

Redleg

[screwballl]

some suggestions I have is to check the hard drive and disc drives in your BIOS to make sure everything is recognized.... maybe reset the BIOS or restore fail-safe defaults... also check to see if the GPU fan is spinning up at all... make sure (if there is one) that the power plug to the GPU is plugged in tight... sometimes I found while resetting the BIOS it helps to remove the video card and put it back in...
other than that I am not sure what else... maybe PSU fails after initial boot???

[Redleg]

(R) didn't work, so now am in the process of formatting and hopefully then reinstalling XP Pro. Figure it's gonna be at least an all day job for me.