here is a little background to my proble. I bought a new sony dvd burner today and I was going to simply replace my cd writer with this. I hooked it up as instructed. Very easy. Just hooked everything up the way the cd drive was. I then went to turn the pc on and it started to boot then went to a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top left hand corner. I tried it a few more times and the same thing. I then took the pc apart again thinking I had the dvd burner hooked up wrong. I then turned it on and it booted up to the desktop fine. I then messed around a little with software and when it asked me to reboot I got the blinking cursor thing again. I have had the pc apart several times and every once in a while it boots up fine. I have cleaned it out fairly good and tried to tighten everything in place. Yet it still wants to boot to the blinking cursor, most of the time. I have tried to put the old cd burner back in and its the same thing. I have looked everything over and I can't figure it out. Any ideas? The pc is an older emachines desktop model #s1940. about 4 years old. I am operating windows xp.
Emachine blinking cursor problem
- Thread starter cadensdad
- Start date
suprasteve
New Member
it might be tryng to boot from the cd/dvd drive even though there's nothing in it, it should then go to booting from the hard drive but it might have something still going wrong. Go into your bios and make the hard drive the first boot device and see if that helps
suprasteve
New Member
I doubt that it has anything to do with video, it should have been plug and play, maybe a few drivers on disk, but obviously something isn't right. I'd try putting in the old cd drive and restoring windows, then maybe try reinstalling the burner.
computerhakk
VIP Member
well, what you can try is unhooking any hardware that you might not need and try booting windows that way to see if they are the cause of anything. if it works, try putting them back in one by one.
however, it sounds like it can be the bios. have u tried resetting the CMOS battery? there is also a different way with 3 pins that is for the cmos setup i believe (dont hold me to that though), capped with a white cap (usually). try taking it off and putting it back. your motherboard manual should be more in depth about it.
however, it sounds like it can be the bios. have u tried resetting the CMOS battery? there is also a different way with 3 pins that is for the cmos setup i believe (dont hold me to that though), capped with a white cap (usually). try taking it off and putting it back. your motherboard manual should be more in depth about it.
suprasteve
New Member
you probably need to e-mail emachines and ask for the bios password, or search google for it, maybe you'll get lucky
Vampiric Rouge
New Member
Or on the mother board pop out the battery and reboot or use jumper 14 (In most pcs) in most cased to reset the bios. That should remove the password and put the boot order and every thing back to defalt settings.
well here is where I stand. I pulled the relay for the cmos and reset the bios. No problems. I at least now can get into my bios. I then set the boot sequence to read hard drive first then cd drive then floppy. The problem is still there. I starts to boot up and goes to the blinking cursor. I tried to move around the relay on the back of the cd drive to master/ slave/ cs.. Still the same thing on boot up... The emachines logo comes up then right to the blinking cursor. Is there anything else I can try in bios, etc.. I am getting aggravated. I may just kick this pc out my door. lol