Had a virus on the dell lap top inspiron 1720, reinstall os from disc everything was going find then on completion of install black screen and only the mouse was there, reinstall twice and same thing. Any thoughts ?
So now I have nothing :mad:

Was this the disk supplied with the computer?

Yes both of them

Could be a matter of patience. The amount of time for first boot up on some slower computers can be astronomical. When I was doing Vista Upgrades (Ugh) after any update, or first install would take over 30 minutes sometimes.

Do you get a Dell splash screan? If so try a safe mode boot usually pressing f8 will boot you into safe mode it will boot running only basic drivers and will cause lots of applications to not preload. If you can boot in safe mode start looking at the proprietary video card drivers and applications that load during a normal boot. Msconfig and be used to keep most applications from loading at boot but you would first have to be able to boot at least in safe mode to run it.

cmeeks, I could start up on safe mode but when booting up files would freeze at scandics and that is as far as I could go.

Infojunkie4life. This reinstall would take 2 hours per install, and that was not the drivers which would not work at all