I own a Compaq Presario 7594 that I have had for ~5 years without having any major issues. I went away on vacation a couple of weeks ago (& I did remember to turn off the computer & shut down the power strip), but when I came back from vacation, I found that my computer would not even start. It showed the red COMPAQ letters screen & then went to the Windows 98 screen & then after a couple seconds showed the "It is now safe to turn off the computer" screen. To fix this, I was able to rebuild the computer & upgrade it to Winodws XP. Everything worked fine for about a week & a half or so, but now I have a similar but more vexing problem:

When I start up, the COMPAQ screen comes up, but then it goes to a black screen with just the blinking underscore cursor (& no keyboard fxn) & it doesn't do anything from there. Once in a while after a reboot, I used to get a screen that tells me Windows didn't start properly last time, should I start windows normally, start in safe mode, start with last known parameters that worked, etc... But I havent gotten this in the past few reboots.

When I try & put in the Windows XP pro installation CD & restart, nothing new happens (I don't even think the CD drive is reading). When I try & put in the Windows XP startup floppy I had, i can get to a DOS prompt. Originally I couldn't go to any other drive than A:...i would just get a message "Invalid drive specification", even for drive C:. Just now, after rebooting again, I can get so that it says C:\>, but when i pull up the dir, there are only 3 files in there. As well, i still can't get any CD drive to read.

What's the prognosis? I don't know what else to try/look at.

Help would be gladly appreciated! (p.s. sorry for the long/rambling letter, but i've been having a lot of troulbe with this computer since i've come back from vacation)

I had something similar to what is happening to you on my old computer. the diagnosis for that computer, was the motherboard is wrecked.

I'd try replacing the CMOS battery and see if it helps at all.

I will try checking the battery. I found a website online that recommended first trying to leave the computer on for ~24 hours, to "recharge" it, before you decide to replace it. Do you have any other suggestions? or do you know what may have been the cause of such problem? or was it just that the computer is getting old?

i'll get back to you when i know more about the batttery!

The only reason I can think of is the corrupted boot.ini file. I'm not pretty sure.

I doubt if leaving it on is going to 'recharge' the battery, but hey, it won't cost anything to try

From the way you described the events, this seems like the most likely cause to me. If it's not the battery, it could be one of the other suggestions made previously (boot.ini or motherboard).

it's been almost 20 hours & no change so far.

what is entailed in fixing the boot.ini, if that might be the problem?

thanks again for helping me! i hope we can figure out a solution

Have you replaced the battery yet? You should do that before trying anything else. They aren't very expensive or hard to replace.

I just replaced the CMOS battery this morning, but no luck. The computer recognized that there had been a battery change & it automatically restored the CMOS settings to default, but I still can't get past the opening COMPAQ screen. Do you have any other suggestions?

p.s. When I use a Windows XP startup floppy disk to get to a command prompt, I can access the C drive and view the directory ("dir" function). There are only 5 files that pop up, "a" "0" "F" "t" and "f", all of which are about 7MB large, and it says that there is ~750MB left on my C drive (which is about right where it was before the crash, as far as I can remember).

Here is the boot.ini file but it'll only work if :

your OS is windows xp
your hard drive is set in primary master slot
and your windows is installed in c drive.

just copy and paste the file in your c drive.

note : donot paste the zip file ... paste the boot.ini file.