Compaq I cant get the system to reboot. I tried F10, I put the recovery disk in but it says it is rebooting but I just get a black screen.

find someone with a win8 disk & try rebooting it with it, choosing repair.

Try this one:Reboot the computer and repeatedly press F10 at the HP or Compaq logo until the recovery screen appears.
When the recovery screen appears, press "Next" and then "Yes" to do recovery.
After the recovery is finished, the Computer will reboot.

I would first try recovering the computer by pressing f10 as the computer is booting. If the compaq didn't come installed with a recovery partition, or like you said, no recovery discs, then you will either need to find someone who has a windows XP disc, buy an XP disc, or take the comp to the computer shop so they can run the windows xp recovery console.
If you want a really accurate, thorough explanation of why this problem happened in this first place, read this microsoft article here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314503/en-us
Good luck. Hopefully you can find someone that already has an xp disc.

you will need a Windows boot disk / Windows install disk / WinXP disk to reboot the PC and install / or repair your OS

rescue disk will not boot your PC
to enable that you need to enter the BIOS, press F1, F2 or Del to enter BIOS , then you need to look for the BOOT seq in BIOS, change that to CD DVD drive as the 1st boot device, Save and Exit and insert the boot CD and restart
this should give you the solution

Hope this steps will help you in restoring

a. Reboot your Compaq Laptop, You have to press F10 key when there is HP logo appears, press it until recovery screen.
b. When recovery screen appears, Choose “Next” and You may have to select “Yes” to non-destruction recovery
c. If you want to desctructive recovery, you may select advance and select “Yes”.
d. If your recovery finished, your laptop will reboot automatically and you’ll get fresh Operating system in your laptop.

Let me know if it helped you

Thanks

trojan

There might be a bios setting that you have too set for the recovery mode. If you can get into the BIOS then check to see if there's a setting for recovery. You can also try at boot up (before the Windows error) to hit Ctrl-F10.

Here are recovery instructions for HP/Compaq laptops.

1. Reboot, and repeatedly press F10 at the HP logo until the recovery screen appears.
2. When the recovery screen appears, press "Next" and then "Yes" to perform a non-destructive recovery.
3. To perform a destructive recovery, click "Advanced" and then "Yes".
4. After the recovery is finished, the laptop will reboot.

Trying pressing F8 about every 5 seconds from the you turn the computer on any faster and this will give a stuck key error. This should put you in safe mode.

Power outages can cause problems. Based upon the symptoms your motherboard or hard drive has been damaged.