HP Pavilion black screen and flashing cursor on boot

Hi,

I have a HP pavilion that presents a black screen with flashing cursor top left from boot just after seeing to bios screen, My guess would be a failed update has caused a problem, The PC belongs to a relative who is worried sick about loosing all her photos (we have had the back up conversation many times) , The O/S is passworded and I do have it, but that gives me no option to install the drive in another pc and pull the info off that way, The cyberlink recovery software won't left me back up any files to disk or external drive and just gives an error code, There is no option to get the pc to start in safe mode, My only option seems to be command prompt on the install disk, I can see from notepad that everything on the disk seems to be OK, I have tried the bootrec commands with no luck, The net user doesn't show any names? , tried to enable safe mode but think the password or no elevated privileges is a problem

Many HP computers have bios UEFI diagnostics.
Repetitively click the F10 key on boot and then navigate the menu to system diagnostics or UEFI diagnostics.
Run the diagnostic test in extensive mode or loop until failure mode overnight.
Report in the thread which hardware diagnostic steps you were able to run and the results.
This may allow us to rule in/out hardware problems.

In case you do not have HP diagnostics create a bootable UEFI diagnostics flash drive:

HP PC Hardware Diagnostics | HP® Official Site

Are the files backed up?

To boot to windows troubleshooting options please find another working computer.
Using a flash drive create a bootable windows 10 iso:

Download Windows 10

For HP computers use the F9 key to boot to the windows 10 iso.

Once you have the bootable windows 10 iso you should be able to boot to the windows troubleshooting menu providing more options to repair operating system/registry problems.

Thank you for the replies, I should of stated that the it is a desktop pc which originally came installed with windows 7 but has been running 10 fine prior to the problem, The UEFI diagnostics were run and had no reported problems, I have already tried the troubleshooting menu on the windows 10 iso, The startup repair said it couldn't fix anything and I couldn't get the command prompt to allow the pc to boot into safe mode, Is there anyway to get the cmd on the iso disk to run as administrator? , the hard drive has been placed in another pc but I get the access denied message, Is there anyway to take ownership of the files while the drive is installed in another pc? , as far as I know the files are not encrypted, they just had a password on windows log on screen which I have or do i use Kyhi's recovery tools

I'd power down. Ground yourself, open case and remove bios battery. Then press/hold power button for 1 minute. Replace battery and attempt to boot.

The windows 10 advanced troubleshooting options has startup options as a choice when using the menu on the computer. However when using the windows 10 iso there is no option in the menu for startup options. There is startup repair but no startup options. The startup options is where safe mode with command prompt or safe mode with networking is located.

Prior versions of Windows had the option to click the F8 key to get to safe mode. That option is no longer available in windows 10.

When you booted with the windows 10 iso you should be able to get to command prompt: Administrator:X:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe

You should be able to run: Sfc /scannow
Whereas the DISM commands are unavailable when in Windows PE environment
The shutdown commands don't work either.

Please post the results of the scannow.

Then to get to safe mode with command prompt or networking perform the following steps:

Type: Bcdedit /set {default} bootmenupolicy legacy

Then type exit

Then click on the windows advanced troubleshooting menu to shutdown.

Power on and repetitively click the space bar.

This should boot to a menu where you can choose either safe mode with command prompt or safe mode with networking.


There are other options to attempt to repair the operating system:
Reset save files
In place upgrade

And two other options that are sometimes helpful are:
Hard drive enclosure with USB connection or placing the primary drive into the secondary bay of another computer

Thank you for the advice I installed the hard drive in another pc and tried to use the take ownership option but the drive kept locking up, In the end I used the recovery tools rescue disk, installed it on a usb stick as the disk option wouldn't work ( I assume it's an UEFI problem) , I used the AOMIE backupper to pull the required folders from the hard drive, Wasn't worried about trying to repair the windows 10 install after I got what I wanted as preferred to reformat and do a fresh install instead so the pc is now up and running, I notice that HP don't offer any windows 10 drivers for this particular model so I do wonder if another problem like this could arise in the near future