the computer turns on and then goes to black screen that says, start windown normally or, start with repair. No matter which one i hit the screen goes blank.

Sounds like Windows is corrupt. Do you have your Windows CD? If so, boot to it, select the recovery console, and run chkdsk /r. If that doesn't work, you may want to download the UBCD4WIN and use that to attempt a restore.

Thank you for your response. Unfortunately my laptop did not come with any diskettes...there was only a paper print out stating "with windows Vista you don't need recovery disks.!"...so i am out of luck there....any "f" keys i have pressed do not work and i cannot go any further than a black screen after choosing an option....

You've got a problem then. The suggestion in HoustonIT's post was that, using another PC, you download and burn to CD a bootable disk with which you can use the DOS type utilities to see what's wrong with your hard disk.

Take a look at the V6000 documentation (page B1) downloadable from
http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c00748684.pdf