black screen please help

Hi!

Hope someone can help me. My 14 year old son has my old laptop which is an acer aspire 5720z with windows vista home premium. I gave it to him because the cd drive broke and we've never replaced it. Usually if theres a problem we can just use alt F10 to automatically reformat. Last night windows automatically began installing updates. Since then all we're getting after the initial second Acer loading screen is a black screen with flashing white cursor in top left of window. It won't load into safe mode and won't reformat. As you can imagine my son is very upset and we're baffled as to how windows updates could this. Is there anyone who has any ideas at all that would not include using any kind of disk? I'd be really grateful for any help

Suzanna

 

Hitting Alt with F10 should get you to your recovery partition. There may be a repair option, else you would have to reinstall. :wave:wave

 

Hi!

Thanks for the help. Alt 10 isn't working either. Have contacted my oldest son who says he has something called a flash drive and so will take a look tomorrow.

 

Thankyou for the help. I will hunt around and see if i have a recovery disk. I don't remember getting one when i bought the laptop but it's possible i did.

Thanks again for all the help. I'll let you know if it works.

Suzanna