I'm using a Sony Vaio laptop which is a year and a half old, and I was on YouTube, then the screen went black and restarted, so the Sony Vaio screen shows up, and now it's stuck on the screen where you would tap f7 to bring up safe mode as well as the other options. The screen is all black and there is a blinking white line that goes down a few inches, then stops. Does anyone know what to do? When I restart again and click f7, f8, f11, f12 or crtl+alt+del, it doesn't bring up any safe mode options. It's just stuck on that screen. Please help! F2 is literally the only way to get out of the black screen, but it goes to the bios thing, I think. So it's useless. When I try booting from a windows recovery cd or Linux cd, it doesn't work. This is the worst thing ever!!!
Is your HDD continually clicking? Can you boot from a bootable PE and access the drive? What OS are you running?
The hard drive doesn't sound like it's clicking. All I hear is the computer "breathing". And I can't go to startup repairs. I can't get out of the black screen, I can't use f7 f8 f11 or f12. Only f2
Had a similar issue with a Toshiba Satellite laptop in the past. I dropped it and as it turned out the HDD was gone. Since you didn't, I would be surprised if its the same thing but we are only guessing here at the moment... Since that's the only thing you can access, try entering BIOS and load Setup Defaults. See if that does any good
Eddieranger, you may need to go into your BIOS as soon as you power on (hit the corresponding key for "setup" or "bios"--whatever it's called on your machine) and make sure that your cd/dvd drive is the first thing that the machine looks to boot from. you mentioned that a recovery cd didn't work but i highly doubt that your cd/dvd drive and hdd would go out at exactly the same time (and i don't think that either is what has happened at all). probably just a config error as most new machines have the hdd listed at the top of the boot list by default. if you make the cd/dvd drive the first bootable device in the bios and you still can't get the recovery disc to load, then your motherboard has most likely gone out, but the only problem with this is that you most likely would not even be able to get into the bios if your motherboard was bad. also, if you do get the recovery disc/windows 7 disc to work you should just do a startup repair as acrsn mentioned. this should get you back up and running without destroying all your data. if you feel that a format and reinstall is necessary, i would get a live cd (i prefer ultimate boot cd (XP based) even though it's outdated, simply because for me Hiren's did not enable any type of internet access and i generally didn't like it anyway was a waste of a dvd and download time in my opinion) and back up all your important data first.