Toshiba Laptop will not boot

[tmg]

A friend from work asked me to take a look at her laptop as it wasn't getting into windows on her account. I agreed and brought it home this afternoon (30th), but when I turned it on, all that happens is this:

Toshiba Bootscreen, then all there is, is a little half-T in the upper left hand corner and a cursor...I don't know what it is and have never seen it on a Desktop PC or any other laptop for that matter.

I can't use any of the keys, not even the F1 to F12, although CTRL ALT and DELETE work as usual.

I reset the BIOS setting (doesn't look like they've changed anyway) but I have had no luck still and I would like to get it fixed for her. If anyone can help, please do...

If you need a picture to relate to what I am talking about then just ask.

[Paril]

At first glance, I'm guessing it's a virus or a corrupt driver.

Does it boot into safe mode?

-P

[spirit]

Doesn't sound so from that description.

Is the HDD detected in the BIOS? It may be broken.

Can you boot the box from a CD (make sure to set the CDROM drive as the first boot device in BIOS)?

[Paril]

If it doesn't boot up (ie, nothing gets to boot up), generally something would be stopping it from finishing main initialization. Hence, corrupted driver, or a virus.

If Windows was able to load to the desktop (even just the cursor), the main Windows components loaded successfully. Safe mode would be the best bet here because it lists drivers loading, and if it freezes at a certain driver we can take a better stab at what's causing it.

Not sure exactly what you could accomplish from booting from a CD, but you could try Windows' repair utilities on the disks.

-Paril

[tmg]

Nah it doesn't get past the splash screen when it first turns on.

Took it to a mates place to try and see if the HDD could be read on the sata dock he has, but to no avail...it kept asking us if we'd like to format it.

In the end I rang the chick from my work that owns it and told her, and she said just format it as she'd found backup copies of all her photos and tunes, so we just did that and put XP Home on it for her.

So it's working again.