Windows 7 laptop black screen

A friend asked me to look at her computer for her (she seems to think I know how to fix them) telling me it isnt loading.

The laptop is a Gateway Nv55c

I turned the laptop on and it goes straight to a black screen with a flashing cursor. No POST visible.

I am unable to F8 into safemode.

I was able to use my Windows 7 disk to try the "repair startup" option. Ran that 3 times (saw that suggested on this site somewhere), but it made no difference.

I then loaded the command prompt from the recovery window and ran the chkdsk /r on the hard drive (drive "d"). It finished after a couple of hours. I didn't see anything alarming (meaning nothing about bad sectors etc), but it did say it was unable to create a log file.

I forgot to mention that prior to the chkdsk I tried to do a system restore to no avail.

Would it be a safe bet to follow the instructions AustrAlien posted in this thread as far as creating a xPUD disk and posting the results?

Thanks in advance for the help