My Laptop will not start up

My son had his PC on during the night of April 25. When he woke up the following morning, the 26th, his PC was off. Attempts to restart were futile. Starting, the Dell logo comes on and the screen goes to the screen saying that windows did not start and tells you to select one of several startups, i.e., Safe Mode, etc.,,Use last known good configuration, etc. Attempts at using any of these choices has the same affect, WindowsXP logo screen and then a blank, black screen.

Bottom line is that not only does the computer not start, I can't even get into safe mode to debug. Now what choices do I have. Someone told me that it might have been hit with the Chernoble virus April 26th Date significance). Don't know, but is there a fix and if so how do I go about it without having access to the Safe Mode???? Help!

 

Hi Chaslang,

Yes, I hit the F2 key and it brought into the Bios Setup screen and in there the harddrive and Ram all show up, nothing unusal on the screen.

By the WIndows bootable disk I assume you mean the Windows CD that came with the computer. Is it the Windows CD or the Recovery Disk that came with the machine?