Xp help

Hey another problem but with my dads laptop....
He has a toshiba equium m50-216 and had it for about 3 years. When he turned on this morning it started up but it was just the wallpaper, no icons no taskbar no start menu NOTHING :s Tryed to boot in safe mode and fails...
What could that be? I was thinking hdd failure?

Thanks for your time

Hi,

A temporary solution to this is to bring up the task manager and clicking on the new task button and then writing "explorer.exe" (without the quotes) and then Ok.

What you could try and see if it works would be a system restore to a date before it started doing it (preferably in safe mode).

I can enter anything atal.... I can just see wallpaper and mouse arrow. The computer would not do a thing. Tryd the task manager and tryed pressing the windows button.
Just tryn to install vista into it but disk isnt workin, what hdd would this take... the hdd has several pins on the end not like a normal hdd ...
Thanks

Do you mean by that that it is like frozen?

Edited too late for the rest of the question I guess, it's in my next post.

yes but mouse is able to moove about

Does it do the same thing in safe mode? On most computers to go to safe mode you have to press F8 upon start up and choose the right option.

Its not letting me boot in safe mode. Ive tryed. Just restarts the computer

I'm going to look more into this when I get time, as I have to go. I don't want to suggest a full reinstall.