I have a Dell Inspiron 5150. It was working fine. My daughter turned it off and the next time she turned it on all she got was a black screen and a blinking cursor. I had her bring it home with her for Thanksgiving. It won't go into bios or safe mode. I took the battery out for a few minutes, put it back in and it started booting up but froze up. I did a hard shut down and it's back to the black screen. I put the XP Pro cd in and it did nothing.

Does any one have an idea?

NonnaDo you normally get a "splash screen" with the Dell logo?  Does Dell require you to press the delete key to get to BIOS, or one of the F KEYS?

I don't remember. It's my daughter's. I just tried all the "regular" keys.Oh, and no splash screen.No, you done good to try all the "regular" keys.  "Del", "F1","F2", and even "F10" get you to BIOS on some systems.

Does the blinking cursor show up right away, once you turn on the power?it shows up immediatelyHave you tried the battery trick again and then try to get into the safe boot menu? If so, you might be able to run a disk check/repair from safe mode.

Also, have you tried to boot from the recovery CD or any bootable CD? If this works, you have a hard drive problem. It could be corrupted software or root on the drive, or an actual physical error. My drive crapped out on my HP laptop several months ago. I was able to find a replacement on Ebay with Windows XP preloaded for $50.00. I just pulled the old one out, put the NEW one in, and presto it booted. Of course I lost any data that I had not backed up to my server recently, and had to reinstall all my software packages. Best Buy's Geek SQUAD guys wanted $200 just to LOOK at it, so this was a cheap alternative.

Good luck.yeah, the battery trick hasn't worked again. I GUESS I'll get an external floppy drive tomorrow and try this 98 start-up disc I have and see what I can do with it.

Thanks for all of your help. I'll let you know what happens.

Nonna