Stuck on black screen, large cursor arrow and windows will not load

Hello, I recently started getting a black screen when trying to turn on my laptop, a Sony Vaio running Windows 10. I am unable to download the DM log collector tool since I cannot use my computer at all. It stays on the black screen even if I let it sit for hours. It's possible that I backed up a Windows 10 file when originally upgrading from WIN7 but I'm not sure and if so, it would be on an external hard drive. What can I do? Please help. Thank you so much.

Mike
US Navy

Thanks so much for the crazy fast reply - but how I am supposed to be able to download the file or run it on the computer that won't allow me to boot it?

D3LL said:

Please follow this guide here & edit your thread & upload files accordingly to enable to us to help you more quickly. BSOD - Posting Instructions - Windows 10 Forums

Hmmm. Holding f10 while turning it on allowed vaio rescue to begin, which is progress, but it froze on the 'select rescue type' screen. I plugged in my external HD to save data to it and selected 'easy rescue' but it's not responding to my pressing tab, the cursor won't move etc.

D3LL said:

My apologises, What happens when you press F10 after the BIOS Flash Screen? Are you able to get into the Windows 10 menu.

Update. Holding F10 during boot up started the Vaio recovery wizard. I let it sit for quite some time (a couple hours) and it recognized the external hard drive I had connected which I believed contained the backup files I need. At first it was asking for me to install the drivers to the external HDD and I was able to browse the contents of the external HDD. It did not allow me to hit "next" because it appeared to be in need of a driver for the external HDD. I browsed a few of the partitions and at some point I was able to hit 'next' and begin the recovery.

It took a while but finally it began to do the system repair and warned me that several restarts would happen. Before it restarted even once, an error screen told me that the process encountered an issue and had to stop. Then I got the 'recovery choice' page again. I clicked on 'easy' and it started up the process again, but for many, many hours now it has had a status bar saying 'discovering data'. It seems to be stuck in a cycle, unless there is just THAT much data for it to discover that it needs to discover it for 12 hours.