I've had this issue with many computers, and often times, they just end up not being fixed. I'm fed up with this issue and I need some straight answers concerning it. Everything I read online is of absolutely no help and it has never been on this issue. This is an HP Pavilion ze5185 laptop. Probably not that old, but it hangs on the black screen with the options of ESC to change boot order, F2 to enter setup, F10 for diagnostics tools, and F12 to boot from lan. Now, it hangs on most of these options and won't get past any of them. I've managed to get into the bios and change the boot order to make it boot from a CD first, but the Windows XP disc will not boot. Also, I've downloaded a big diagnostics disk that also will not run. Nothing will run from anything. I really can't describe the problem more other than I'm unable to follow procedures to reinstall or do diagnostics to figure out of the hard drive is dead or what. I am at a loss and I'm getting sick of this issue coming up on so many computers and being unable to do anything about it. I need to pin this down and make sure it's the hard drive so I don't order a replacement and it still not work. Would replacing the hard drive remedy this problem?

"Would replacing the hard drive remedy this problem" If you can't boot to the CD and it hangs when trying to enter the BIOS, this would not be a hard drive issue. My suspicions would be bad RAM.

Have you tried booting from a floppy? You can download a file that will create a bootable floppy from www.bootdisk.com. If you can boot from a floppy, you can download a diagnostic from the hard drive manufacturer's web site. Do yourself a favor BACKUP!

i recently looked at a friends laptop which would hang a black screen. I found that if i went into the BIOS/Setup and disabled the level 2 cache it would then work perfectly. (level 2 cache was enabled in the fail safe option so even the fail safe option did not work). Bit of a long shot but it might help you.