Laptop boots to black screen with mouse cursor - how to confirm OS?

deusvolt

Distinguished
Feb 3, 2011
6
0
18,510
Hi all,

My wife's Lenovo laptop boots through to the usual safemode options (normal, safemode, safemode with networking etc)
But no matter which option you select after that it goes to a black screen with the mouse cursor visible and loading circle occasionally flashing up beneath it. You can move the cursor around with touchpad/mouse. Keyboard seems to do nothing.

I am guessing I need a boot disk to resolve (I suspect damage caused by virus, nothing we can think of that would have done it), however my wife isn't sure which version of windows she had - we think Windows 7, but when I asked if 32 or 64 bit I got a bit of a blank stare....

Is there any way to confirm the OS on there? The BIOS doesn't show it, so I am rather stuck.

Alternatively, is there any such thing as a link cable I can hook the laptop up to my desktop with and browse the laptop HDD from there?

Any help gratefully received.

Thanks in advance to anyone that can help!

 
Solution
Have you tried pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL? Do this after you boot and you see the mouse cursor. If it opens the Task Manager, then run explorer.exe, that would open up the desktop... I have experienced this before due to an update gone wrong... It recently went away after another update went wrong and windows goes on automatic recovery :)

slico79

Estimable
Mar 22, 2015
5
0
4,520
Have you tried pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL? Do this after you boot and you see the mouse cursor. If it opens the Task Manager, then run explorer.exe, that would open up the desktop... I have experienced this before due to an update gone wrong... It recently went away after another update went wrong and windows goes on automatic recovery :)
 
Solution

deusvolt

Distinguished
Feb 3, 2011
6
0
18,510
Thank you everyone for the answers, and apologies for the delayed reply.
In the end I opted to boot the laptop into ubuntu off a USB, this has enabled me to get access to the HDD to retrieve the all important photos and documents etc to an external HDD.

In doing this, the computer crashed halfway through so I will take another run at it, but it appears the HDD is just slowly dying on the laptop.

Thank you all once again, and Happy Easter!!