HP laptop won't boot past blue Windows screen

I have an hp pavillion ze5185 laptop and when I turned it on yesterday, it started booting up and just paused at that blue Windows XP screen (just before Windows plays it's dandy startup music). It wasn't frozen - I could move the mouse arrow around and everything - but no keyboard keys would register, not even my favorite Ctrl-Alt-Del. Left it for hours and it still didn't get past that screen. Turned off and on multiple times, tried loading default setup values, starting in safe mode, and it still wouldn't get past that screen.

This may be connected to the problem, who knows: recently a blue screen of death has been popping up whenever I was using the laptop and then the computer would restart itself. The blue screen said something like, "It's ok if this screen pops up once but if it happens more often then do something about it." My brother said it was an overheating problem.

When I try to open the DVD drive at this blue screen, it'll open for me! Wonder if that makes a difference...

I can enter PhoenixBIOS if I press F2 before it gets to that stupid Windows screen. Let me know if you helpful computer geniuses need any more information! Please help!

 

Try going into safe mode (f8) and if you get there got to a restore point

or instead of safe mode, boot to last known good config (also at F8)

 

Hitting F8 when it was booting up did nothing...although my more-computer-inclined roommate said he already ran it in safe mode and it stopped booting at the same blue Windows screen.

But I did try hitting other F# keys when it was booting up, I think F10 got me to e-diagtools and I ran the tests (Tests passed. No errors found.) Don't know what it did but I'll add more info that it showed about my computer:

Platform: HP Pavillion ze4000
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium( @2400 MHz
System Memory: 512 MB
IDE PRIMARY-MASTER : HDD, 55.9 GB, HITACHI_DK23EA-60
IDE SECONDARY-MASTER: CD-ROM, QSI CD-RW/DVD-ROM SBW-241

 

Boot from the XP CD and try a repair

 

Hi Niftee. I wanted to know if you were able to get a solution to the problem because i have the exact same issue with my laptop. Much obliged.

 

hey enyarick. even with my computer geek friends helping me, i found no solution and ended up having to reinstall windows. lost all the info saved on my drive. good luck!

 

My daughter's laptop did that, it's a glitch in the HP laptops...and if you will hold on, I will find the thread on the hp web site that discussed that issue. Liz

 

wow, great. it would be good to know for the future at least. thanks!

 

It's like it won't come back out of standby mode? Is that it? Cause that's what hers was doing and here is the solution: http://tinyurl.com/6d258 Liz