Windows Vista 64 bit system with 4 GB memory and a 350 GB HDD. Computer 
had been working fine. Turned it on yesterday morning and it sat there 
for about 1 hour - no one noticed that it almost had no screen. My 
daughter wanted to use it and she was complaining that it was very slow! 
When I looked at it, I tried forcing a shutdown and then restarting. A 
"Windows was shut down improperly" DOS message screen appeared and 
offered to start normally, in Safe Mode, in SM w/Networking or SM 
w/Command Prompt. I tried the three versions of safe mode and this is 
what I got: an HP invent logo appeared in the center of the screen and a 
DOS text message appeared in the lower left corner (I assume that this 
means the display is not dead). Next a scrolling list of files that are 
being loaded pass by with the last on being 
windows\system32\drivers\crcdisk.sys. The the screen goes near dark and 
the only thing displaying is a slightly oversize cursor arrow. There are 
no beeps, no caps-lock lights flashing code (supposed to indicate a post 
error) or anything. The hard drive led shows activity for almost 8 
minutes after. There is no inkling of any color on the display 
whatsoever. Just arbitrarily typing in the log-in code doesn't do 
anything. Anyone have any ideas?

Jean Bourvic


Jean, at first glance, the basics seem to be working okay, so I suspect 
that either the hard drive  has become corrupted, which you might be 
able to fix, or else the hard drive has gone South and needs to be replaced.

To try to fix a corrupted hard drive, boot to the Windows Operating 
System disk and tell it to do a "Repair."  If you are lucky, then this 
will fix it.  If not, then the best thing to do is to replace the hard 
drive and do a fresh install of the operating system and replace your 
files from your back-ups.  You could try using the old disk if you are 
on a very tight budget, but, personally, I think that replacing the hard 
drive with a new one has the highest probability of long-term success 
and lack of more hassle.

HTH

Dean Kukral

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