Vista - Black screen with mouse cursor on boot

My laptop is stuck at the boot screen with a black screen and the mouse cursor on there. I cant get into task manager, safe mode still has the same problem and i have tried booting from the Vista CD to do a repair but it comes up 'windows is loading files' and then just goes to the black screen with the mouse cursor again!

Hello ToonArmy,

You might be able to do a factory recovery of Vista. If your not sure of how to do a factory recovery, then post back with what brand is your laptop and I'll be happy to see if I can wrangle up some instructions from your laptop manufacturer's website for you.

Shawn

Its a Toshiba Satelite P200. Its actually my friends laptop he really wants to keep some of his data like photos and videos of his young children but there is no way to get into windows to access anything! It is strange that it wont load the Vista CD to access the repair tools its says 'setup is loading files' or something like that but then just goes to the black screen again!

Here you go:

How to use the Toshiba HDD Recovery Utility


The only way that he may be able to recover his files is to remove the hard drive and connect it temporarly in a desktop computer. You might be able to then access and copy the files to back them up.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Thanks for the link mate. How would i go about connecting it to my desktop temporarly would i need an adapter?

Yes, an adapter is necessary. In the US I purchased this one for about $28: SATA and IDE Hard Drive & Optical Drive USB Adapter Kit COMBO

We use this one at work and prefer it to the one that the company has supplied us. Although it doesn't have a case for the drive, you can just set it on the table top while you use it - then put the drive back in the system when you're done.

FWIW - Toshiba's don't usually have a repair function in their recovery disks - usually the disks will wipe the hard drive clean and reimage the original Windows installation.

Looking at your motherboard specs, you have both a IDE and SATA connection port. You should be able to connect the laptop's drive directly to the motherboard via the standard IDE or SATA and power cable like you would any other internal drive.

So I should be able to connect the laptop drive to my desktop and boot into my drive (i am running Windows7) and copy the files to backup over from the laptop HDD to my desktop is that correct?

If the laptop's hard drive is not completely corrupted you may be able to yes.

Managed to connect the laptop HDD to my desktop and copy the files over tonight then formatted and re-installed vista on it all working great now. Thanks very much for the help Brink you have saved my friend a lot of money!!