Ok I hope I'm in the right forum... I hope anyone can try to help, I have a Compaq laptop and it's about 3 years old nothing ancient and I frequently run virus and all that. But I was on it the other day and all the sudden it started beeping and the screen turned blue with white writing almost like a shortout like went into dos mode, shut down restarted itself, and said something about nostkrnl.exe corruption error. I ran dskchck and it said it recovered and it was checked and fine. And I even ran my backup cd, and nothing is working. When I run the BIOS startup and do the hard disk scan it says estimated time 70 minutes, and after about 15 it says error #2 failed. Now it's to the point sometimes the screen won't come on or the desktop won't load. Is this the hard drive, or just a windows type error? Anyone? Thanks for any help...

ntoskrnl.exe* sorry

sounds like you hdd has bad sectors that can't be repaired.
I suggest to try backing up all data you need. then you can try to install/re-install or use the repair function of your windows cd. if windows comes up again you are the lucky one and if not you still have your data and need to buy a new drive.

hope this helps you
mscrx