Laptop won't load windows

[Trader]

Hi guys, hoping one of you IT gurus can help.

I've got an old laptop (toshiba satellite A350) running windows vista that stopped working last night.
The system froze and once holding down the power key to restart it, it loaded in safe mode fine, so I restated it to load normally, and it ran a scan (in the dos sort of screen, not in windows). The scan then aborted itself and said it couldn't be completed. The computer then restarted itself and after the initial toshiba screen (where you can press F2 to open bios etc), it just went to a black screen with a white flashing _ in the top left cnr. I can't type or move the mouse.

I tried pressing F8 on start up to enter safe mode but that's doing nothing.
I took the battery out and unplugged the power to reset the system and that hasn't resolved it either.
I pressed F2 on start up and the bios is loading the HDD first, so that's not the issue either.
I tried ctr+alt+del to start the task manager to exit and restart explorer.exe however it won't get to task manager and simply restarts the computer to the same black screen.

I've got the disc to do a factory reset, and can also access it through the partition by holding 0 on startup, however I would like to copy some files off before wiping the disc.

Does anyone know a way of getting it to load up so I can stick in a USB to copy files over?

[Wedgie]

Had this issue several times but luckily it was my desktop as it was a stuffed hard drive each time.
My fix was to replace hard drives which isn't much good to you, sorry

[bennymacca]

Yep, sounds like a buggered hard drive.

You could check this by getting a HDD dock and plugging the drive into another computer, to see whether you can read it.

After nearly losing all of my photos, Dissident managed to get them back for me, but after that I have made sure I have had some sort of backup at all times

[Trader]

You could check this by getting a HDD dock and plugging the drive into another computer, to see whether you can read it.

Yeah, had a crack at this tonight, no good unfortunately. Seems the HDD is fried.
Ah well, 6 years isn't too bad I guess.

Nothing overly important lost.