black screen?

[antikmusic]

I have a gateway laptop from 2003. The warranty is up and it won't start. I just get a black screen and a blinking cursor. Any ideas on the problem?

[antikmusic]

I have also tried to boot from the xp cd and got nothing. Now I cant get to the boot menu screen.

[Alaron]

Are you booting from the battery or AC power? Try both.

Are you comfortable opening the machine? I think it might be wise to remove the hard drive to backup your data.

[antikmusic]

I hav e tried both. What seems to be happing is I can get to the BIOS screen but then If I try to load from the XP disk or the hard drive it just goes to a black screen with a curser. Looks like the cmd screen but I cant do anything. I pulled the hard drive out and put into a external case and can access all the files from my othe machine.

[glc]

I'd get those files backed up - more likely than not, the laptop has seen better days, you may be looking at a motherboard replacement which is not worth it on a 4 year old machine.