I have an old 1999 windows laptop with the black screen of death, help please?

Question

Okay, my laptop has been with me for ages and I have a ton of info on it. I don't want to upgrade it and it hasn't been on the internet in 8 plus years.

Today when I was booting it up it gave me a black screen with this blinking white space and no matter what it never changed.

If my laptop's a gonner then can I get my documents off there?

If my laptop can be saved, can you help me please?

Answer 1

That isn't the "black screen of death", your computer is going through POST, try going into the BIOS and change the boot settings, try changing the Hard Drive Group to boot first, instead of the CD ROM Group.

Answer 2

Ah. The old MS-DOS.

The 'white space' is a 'white underscore', it is the booting of Windows 98/95/ME from the Hard Drive. If the underscore isn't moving you may need to change the way the computer boots.

Enter the BIOS, via pressing 'Del' (Delete) when it starts up. In the bios you should be able to change the boot order.

If none of that works, you'll need to take out your hard drive, and take it to the computer shop to let them recover your documents. (Can be achieved via a data cable)