I've had a gateway laptop for about a year now. I hardly started using it until recently. It has no internet so I don't know if the problem is a virus or not. When I start the computer a black screen comes up and it has these options:

Safe Mode
Safe Mode with Networking
Safe Mode with Command Prompt

Last known good configuration (your most recent settings that worked)

Start Windows Normally



I've click on every option available and when I do the Windows XP screen with the four color flag pops up and the marquee bar on the bottom just keeps moving but it never takes me to the user log in screen. (I left it like like for about 2 hours and saw no change.) I also tried to do a system recovery but all I saw for about 3 hours was a screen that said


'GATEWAY'
Please wait...



Somebody please help me!

:(

How did you try the system recovery?

Did your laptop come with recovery disks or is there a recovery partition that you can restore form?

Safe mode just brings black screen?

Does safe mode command prompt work for you?

If ;you can get to prompt, try this


you can start the System Restore tool from the command prompt. This is useful if you cannot start your computer normally or in Safe Mode. To start the utility using this method, restart your computer and press F8 during startup. From the boot options, select Safe Mode with a command prompt. You can then log on to your computer using an account with administrative privileges.

The last step is to launch the System Restore tool. You can do this by typing the following command at the command prompt.

%systemroot%\System32\restore\rstrui.exe

You can then follow the instructions to restore your computer to a previous state.