Vista black screen can't boot

Tried to find topic on self help, specific to my problem with no luck… Computer was completely locked up this morning, so what do I do??? Hit the power button!! I should totally know better! Well, computer restarted, saw Gateway screen with options - Boot Menu(F10) and BIOS settings (F2). Can get into the BIOS settings, but not boot menu. Just a black screen with a flashing cursor in the top left corner. The only other keys that work are 'crtl alt delete,' and then it just restarts it again with the same screen. Cannot even get to safe mode. Did power off everything as well….nothing changed. If anyone can offer any suggestions, I would certainly appreciate it.

You are going to have to get into BIOS Setup on your computer to set the CD/DVD drive as the first bootable device, so you can then boot your XP CD.

How you do this varies with each manufacturer. Normally you press F1, F2, F10 or Del when you see the manufacturers logo. Often there is a clue somewhere on the screen when you boot normally telling you what key to press.

If you don't have an XP CD, download and create a bootable CD from the .iso file XP Recovery Console

You don't burn the iso file itself to CD., you create a CD from the iso file using your CD burning software. There is a good freeware burner called ImgBurn which will
do this.

Boot the CD and at the first opportunity, enter R to start the Recovery Console.
Next, choose which XP installation you want to login to. Normally this will be 1.
Lastly you will be asked for the Administrator password. Just press the Enter key as the Administrator does not have a password (unless you gave it one, then you would enter it).
From the command prompt, enter: chkdsk c: /r
Allow it to complete undisturbed. It can take an hour or more depending on the size of the hard drive.

Remove the CD, type exit and the computer will reboot. Hopefully that will have fixed the problem (corrupted file system).