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)