boot to black

I am trying to help my brother resolve a problem with his eMachine, he's very computer illiterate and lives on the other side of the country.
His problem is simply this, when he turns on his system (WinME)it goes through the eMachine splash screen, then a moment later it goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left, probably dos, but he can't type anything. I had him boot his system while holding down the control button (if memory serves, this should have brought up his BIOS options), this only brought up several garbled lines, what he described as "miniature canes".

Thanks,
JTN

 

Have you tried booting the computer with a boot disk in?.

Can you get into safe mode? (this is by pressing f8 when turning on the computer.) If you can get the menu, have you tried booting it step by step?
Otherwise it could be something to do with the hardware part etc. something inside the computer.

 

Just to add to what jtn3833 has said...

Try pressing DEL to enter the emachine BIOS.
If all the hardware checks are fine, as a LAST resort, you may want to try using the recovery disk that came with the emachine. Actually, you may try booting with the recovery disk, but cancelling the recovery itself just to see if this will work... it can sometimes act as a basic hardware test.

Joyous Monkey

 

After about a week of digging up information to relay to my brother regarding his computer problems I was speaking with him on the phone. I thought that maybe he could make a bootable disc from another computer and asked him if he had any floppies laying around. He replied that he happened to have a floppy disc in the disc drive. "...Could you repeat that please." I asked.
Yes, after over a week of his system being "down" it turned out that it was failing to boot because he had a disc in the drive and for some reason he wasn't getting the normal "non-system disc in drive" warning.
Anyway, thanks for your help in the matter. We both learned from this experience. My brother learned that he can't boot up with a floppy in the disc drive and I learned that I can't assume anything in regards to computers with my brother.

Thanks,
JTN

 

Glad to see you resolved this. Brought a smile to my face (LOL).
Sometimes we forget to check things like that first.