Blinking Cursor

L

lostchris08

New Member
I have a Dell. I boot up the computer. It passes through that part, however, immediately afterwards, a blinking cursor at the top left appears. Nothing else happens. No Windows XP logo. Nothing.

What's the solution?

I have had this blinking cursor problem a couple times. At least three. The only solution that has worked is to reformat. If this method is the only way, does anyone know a way to reduce the risk of a blinking cursor on the XP startup to occur? I've heard that if you install certain things on XP, it becomes unstable. On this most recent occurrence, I remember I installed Microsoft Power Point out of all things and it told me to restart. When I restarted, I got the infamous blinking cursor.

Also, I have some important information on my internal hard drive. If I was to reformat the hard drive, is there a way to transfer the data on the internal hard drive before I reformat? I know there is a way to change my internal hard drive to an external, however, is there a more efficient way?

Thanks for the help.

Chris
 
The drive is probably find, I bet it's just software. Most of the time if you have a hard drive problem, you get errors and such...

Do you have a windows disk you can use? Typically going though the setup and running the Repair option will fix such problems.

And yes, you shouldn't have much trouble converting your drive to external, but it'd be better(if you do say get another drive or something) to just set it as an internal slave.
 
I've tried the windows xp cd and it hasn't worked.

as for the internal drive, you meant to buy a drive and set my current internal drive as a slave right?

Right now, I"m not in the market for an internal hard drive unless of course I found one that is around the same price as the external hard drive enclosure.
 
What do you mean you "tried the CD"? Did you run the repair option and nothing happened or what?

Well, if you're talking about getting an enclosure, I assume you have another PC you can use. Unless it's a laptop, why not just stick the drive in the machine to pull the data?
 
The_Other_One said:
What do you mean you "tried the CD"? Did you run the repair option and nothing happened or what?

Well, if you're talking about getting an enclosure, I assume you have another PC you can use. Unless it's a laptop, why not just stick the drive in the machine to pull the data?
Click to expand...

Yeah. I ran the repair option and it did not work. I also heard about using the Recovery Console and typing fixboot and fixmbr. That didn't work either.

Actually, I do have a laptop... I didn't know I can just stick the drive to the machine. How can I go about doing that? Sorry, I'm not familiar with some of these aspects.
 
Ah, sorry... You CAN'T use a standard hard drive in a laptop. I appology if I wasn't clear. Though it's basically a direct conversion, it wont really fit ;) You will need some sort of enclosure or USB to IDE cable like I have.

Or, if you have a CD/DVD Burner in the computer, you could use something like BartPE or a Linux boot disk and boot your computer from the disk. Then you could just burn your files that way...
 
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