Packard Bell Blank Screen?

I'm trying to sort out issues with this Packard Bell laptop for a friend and his daughter. The machine starts to boot, gets to a "Windows Starting" logo screen and then when the screen goes back it just hangs. There is a mouse curosr that you can move around but no screen to do anything with. i have tried booting it into safe mode with the same result. i took the drive out and put it in a caddy linked to my PC and the file structure is all there. i ran chkdsk on it which found and fixed afew problems (so it said) but when I put the drive back in the laptop it still refused to get past this black screen. I'm tempted to buy this Win 7 recovery disc and see what happens when I boot from that, but I'm wondering if there is anything I have missed. The machine hasn't got a Win 7 OS disc.