Black Screen Blinking Cursor on Boot????

The Muppet

A friend of mine has a problem with his windows xp home PC, can anyone throw any light on what the problem might be.

When It boots it goes past the xp home splash screen and as far as a black screen with a mouse cursor but it goes no further. It does the very same in Safe mode. He has scanned for virus and found nothing, restored the MBR and he has reinstalled xp over itself and it still does the very same (black screen and cursor).

I have goggled for a solution but while there are plenty of people who have had the same symphtoms I did not find a solution.

As usual there is some important information on the drive so he wants to avoid reformatting and reinstalling if at all possible.

Any Ideas Anyone?

Cryos

The Muppet wrote:

A friend of mine has a problem with his windows xp home PC, can anyone throw any light on what the problem might be.

When It boots it goes past the xp home splash screen and as far as a black screen with a mouse cursor but it goes no further. It does the very same in Safe mode. He has scanned for virus and found nothing, restored the MBR and he has reinstalled xp over itself and it still does the very same (black screen and cursor).

I have goggled for a solution but while there are plenty of people who have had the same symphtoms I did not find a solution.

As usual there is some important information on the drive so he wants to avoid reformatting and reinstalling if at all possible.

Any Ideas Anyone?

It sounds like there is something corrupt in windows, you say you have reinstalled windows yeh ? have you repaired the windows installation ?

Very Simple process:

Put in your Windows XP CD
Make sure your cd/dvd drive is ahead of the hard drive
when the "Press any key to boot from CD..." pops up bash a key
when its finished loading hit enter (to setup windows)
You will probably have to accept a licence agreement F8
you will now be presented with a few options, re-install windows
over it self (Enter) or repair windows hit R.

Windows will now repair itself, please keep your product key to hand as you will need it when it boots into the xp setup; complete the setup and log in; this should solve the problem ? And keeps your data intact.

Has anything been installed before this problem happened ?

DonkeyStyle \o/

Is it a windows gui mouse cursor or a blinking block/underscore cursor?
I'd say get your hands on a 'Live' cd (linux or bartPE) and see if the PC is still stable and able to run without locking up, rules out some basic hardware issues to start with... and while you're there back up all his important files, say onto another partition (remember you only have to reformat C) ... or some removable media, if you can swing it.

You could boot it in logged mode and find out at what point in the loading process windows is pooing its pants... then trying to work around that by deleting/replacing the offending files from a command prompt, but personally I wouldn't bother my arse unless you absolutely can't backup the data any other way.
Even physically removing the harddrive and setting it up as a slave drive in another machine with a working OS would let you back up the data and save you potentially hours of farting around.

I assume he also tried last known good configuration?
Though only the odd time that'll actually work I find.

The Muppet

Blitz wrote:

It sounds like there is something corrupt in windows, you say you have reinstalled windows yeh ? have you repaired the windows installation ?

Very Simple process:..................................................................................

Has anything been installed before this problem happened ?

I did that and I also ran chkdsk /r from the recovery console , neither solved the problem.

I'm told there was nothing new installed before the problem occured but the pc has only recently been connected to Broadband so there is a possibility that windows updates were installed. It is a P4 1.7 so I imagine it was running the original version of XP home edition .

Is it a windows gui mouse cursor or a blinking block/underscore cursor?
I'd say get your hands on a 'Live' cd (linux or bartPE) and see if the PC is still stable and able to run without locking up, rules out some basic hardware issues to start with... and while you're there back up all his important files, say onto another partition (remember you only have to reformat C) ... or some removable media, if you can swing it.

You could boot it in logged mode and find out at what point in the loading process windows is pooing its pants... then trying to work around that by deleting/replacing the offending files from a command prompt, but personally I wouldn't bother my arse unless you absolutely can't backup the data any other way.
Even physically removing the harddrive and setting it up as a slave drive in another machine with a working OS would let you back up the data and save you potentially hours of farting around.

I assume he also tried last known good configuration?
Though only the odd time that'll actually work I find.

It is a windows GUI mouse cursor and when I move the mouse the cursor moves normally. I have the pc here and I have tried last know good and VGA mode. I even tried another video card but still no joy.

I will have to back it up if i cant solve it but I just asked here as a last resort before doing that.

Thanks for the replies.