Possible bad hard drive sector?

Hey, Im new to the forums and have a question about an issue with a laptop Ive been having. Small back story. This problem started over a year ago on an Asus 7720 laptop I have, but I deployed to Afghanistan and just stuck the laptop in storage until now. The problem is basically no video output when loading into windows. I see the bootup screen, and can even go into the BIOS or F8 into other options, but once the computer gets to the point of loading a windows screen all I get is a black screen with a cursor on it. It will not go past that even in safe mode. I have noticed however that it will throw up a windows screen saver if sitting on the black screen for so long, which tells me that some portion of windows is being accessed, but nothing else. I also have the cursor. My next step was to try to start pulling ram out one strip at a time to see if anything changed, but this just seems to me like a bad sector on the hard drive or a windows issue. A windows issue doesn't explain not going into safe mode though. I even thought maybe it was an issue with the video card in which it was trying to display itself onto an alternate screen, and no I haven't gotten that far to try that yet. I plan on doing some further troubleshooting now, but wanted to post this question now in case it sounded familiar to someone. Thanks in advance for the help.

 

cybereyes you are defiantly taking the correct troubleshooting steps to try and pin point the problem with the system. I would also suspect it to be a memory problem I seen this issue a few times, so defiantly try booting the system with one stick of RAM at a time. Also could be the hard drive possibly but usually if it was the system wouldn't make it to the Windows screen. Also if you can see if you can hook up an d external monitor to the system to see if an external display exhibits the same behavior. If you system has any built in hardware diagnostics i would run that as well.

 

Just an update. It appears I have fixed the problem, but I have no idea still what was wrong or how it went bad to begin with. I remember it flickering and stalling a few times before it originally just went completely out, so I was afraid it was a hardware issue. I hooked it up to my PC monitor and it did the exact same thing. I took out one stick of Ram and it wouldn't boot at all. I replaced the one stick with the second stick and it still would not boot at all. I had two sticks of laptop ram that I had bought at some point but do not remember what for, and the package was already open. So just for kicks I installed it and got nothing with one or both sticks. I then reinstalled the original two sticks of ram and it booted up and went right to the same windows screen and gave me the same black screen.

In my search I had found some System and recovery disks for an Acer I had just before this one and decided to give it a try. After about 30 minutes it loaded up everything and wiped my hard drive in the process, but booted up just fine. So I don't know. Its working now but I lost all my contents on the drive. I do not even remember what all was on there, so I guess its not that big of a loss, but I really wish I knew what went wrong to begin with. Thanks for the response. Hope this helps someone else in the future who may experience the same thing. Btw, I got the recovery disks from Acer a while back when I had a problem with another laptop. They do not come with the computer.