Windows won't restart

[Eric416]

I have a Dell studio 1558 with win 7 home premium 64 bit. Today I went to restart my computer and it will not load windows. I get the Dell logo and then it goes to a black screen with a blinking underscore. If I press any key it will go back to the Dell logo and then to the black screen again. I tried booting from the disc and did a restore and repair. Both did nothing. I don't know what else to try. I don't want to have to reinstall windows and lose everything.

 

[Eric416]

Any help?

 

[Ambimom]

Methinks your hard drive just died. Do you hear any beeps before you get that cursor? That's a sure sign of hardware failure. Have you tried booting from a live CD like Ubuntu?

 

[Eric416]

I don't get any beeps. I can get into the harddrive if I boot from the win 7 cd and click load drivers in the repair menu. I'm gonna try to put the hd in an external enclosure to see if I can recover my files

 

[Ambimom]

Your problem is hardware, not windows. Sorry about that. It happened to me once or twice which is why I began keeping monthly backups on DVDs, plus I backup to an external drive and I subscribe to Carbonite. I also upload to Gmail the stuff I really don't want to lose. It's never pleasant, but it does happen.