Tried everything but still just a black screen

[sweet tea]

I have read several of the posts and have tried many options but I still can't get vista to boot up.  An elderly friend of mine has a ML 6714 Gateway laptop that she bought from Best Buy and couple of years ago.  It came with NO software disks and the recovery is in a separate partition on her hard drive.  I don't think she has much computer knowledge and I don't know what happened but her laptop will not boot up. She has asked me if I could help. All there is is a black screen with a cursor in the left hand corner.  When you turn it on all it will let you do is an F2 for BIOS and an F10 for how it will boot.  I have tried the following:
1.  VISTA disks (that I did have with my laptop).  It will let me go into the repair part but it does not see any operating system so it has nothing to repair.
2.  At the DOS prompt it appears that the d: drive with the recovery software is ok but I don't know how to get it started.
3.  I did a chkdsk of the c: drive where VISTA supposedly is but it cam back as saying there was a problem with the master file table. 
4.  I have tried alt f8 but all it does it get me back to the black screen and loud noises everytime I press a button. 
5.  I had downloaded just the VISTA recovery part from a website but again, it is not recognizing any operating system.

PLEASE, can anyone help me?  At first I was hoping to save her data but at this point I just want her laptop to work. 

[Azzaboi]

Sounds like a hard drive failure, if the computer beeps a sequence at you or led flashing, check the BIOS POST Error Code. These beeps are indicators of the problems. You will normally find them in the motherboard manual with the computer, however since you don't have that you should also be able to find them online from another computer.

You should enter recovery console and try use the command to repair the master file table: chkdsk /f
or use chkdsk /r, which will take longer, but locates bad sectors and recovers readable information.

If that is however failing you could try more advance software like TestDisk to recover: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk