"Is this a corrupt Hard Drive?" Topic

Son's computer is acting up. It starts in Safe Mode, but you can't run anything. If you start not in Safe Mode it doesn't do anything – the screen goes black. It does make the Windows start up sound, but nothing on screen- not even pointer.

Any ideas, guys? Its a bit urgent – he is in final year of Uni (a computer course!) and the first dissertation is due in 8 Jan. We have a work round for that, but due to his severe dyslexia he has Dragon Natural Speak, but only on the non-working machine.

What version of the OS is he using? It 'might' be a failing hard drive, but I would say more likely Windows files may be corrupted. If you can get into safe mode ok, open up a command prompt in admin mode and type chkdsk c: /f /x /r and press enter – it should say cannot unlock the drive, do you wish to run chkdsk when it restarts, type Y, enter, then exit the command prompt and restart the machine – letting it run a disk check. After that, once again in safe mode and in a command prompt in admin mode, type scf /scannow – this will check the Windows files. Another thing to try, if it is Windows 7 is 'Last known good configuration' from the same list you can choose safe mode from. You can also, within safemode, look to see if there is a restore point, and if so, roll back to then. It may be a corrupted driver.

Whatever you do, back up dissertation now! If necessary, take the PC to a store and back it up.

I save all my important documents to at least two cloud services so that if my computer trashes I have at least 2 copies of it elsewhere on the Internet (dropbox, google drive, pcloud, mega are the services I use but there are others).

The work is all backed up and most of the other stuff, though he has 700 gig of various stuff he doesn't really want to go