XP Will not boot. Underscore blinks on the screen.

[Guest Al Can Help]

I woke up this morning to two computers that had been restarted. I've had a

problem with startup hanging on being unable to boot from A drive please

press F1 to continue. That was on my screen. I've checked the boot sequence

but that's another story. Once past that all I'm getting is a blinking

cursor. I've tried rebooting without success. it does allow me to check my

settings (pressing delete). It does not allow me to start in the safe mode

(pressing f8). I'm running XP SP2, MSI with Intel Dual Core. I haven't made

any hardware or software changes. I'm wondering if there is a virus? I did

run a quick scan just yesterday afternoon.

Thanks

[Guest John John]

Re: XP Will not boot. Underscore blinks on the screen.

 

Are *both* of your computers not booting or is there only one not

booting? The most common cause for a boot making it past the POST but

then immediately hanging with a blinking cursor at the upper top left

corner is that there is no active partition on the hard disk. You can

use a Windows 98 boot disk and Fdisk to check the active status of the

partition or you should be able to boot the hard disk by using your

Windows XP cd, once booted you can use the Disk Management tool to check

the active status of the partition.

 

John

 

Al Can Help wrote:

> I woke up this morning to two computers that had been restarted. I've had a

> problem with startup hanging on being unable to boot from A drive please

> press F1 to continue. That was on my screen. I've checked the boot sequence

> but that's another story. Once past that all I'm getting is a blinking

> cursor. I've tried rebooting without success. it does allow me to check my

> settings (pressing delete). It does not allow me to start in the safe mode

> (pressing f8). I'm running XP SP2, MSI with Intel Dual Core. I haven't made

> any hardware or software changes. I'm wondering if there is a virus? I did

> run a quick scan just yesterday afternoon.

> Thanks

[Guest Malke]

Re: XP Will not boot. Underscore blinks on the screen.

 

Al Can Help wrote:

> I woke up this morning to two computers that had been restarted. I've had

> a problem with startup hanging on being unable to boot from A drive please

> press F1 to continue. That was on my screen. I've checked the boot

> sequence

> but that's another story. Once past that all I'm getting is a blinking

> cursor. I've tried rebooting without success. it does allow me to check

> my

> settings (pressing delete). It does not allow me to start in the safe

> mode

> (pressing f8). I'm running XP SP2, MSI with Intel Dual Core. I haven't

> made

> any hardware or software changes. I'm wondering if there is a virus? I

> did run a quick scan just yesterday afternoon.

> Thanks

 

Does this happen on both computers? When you went into Setup was your hard

drive shown? What other story is there connected with the boot sequence?

That is important because since you mentioned a floppy drive, I'd suggest

making the hard drive first in the boot priority.

 

It sounds like either your hard drive has died or the boot files are

corrupt, although usually you'd get an error message from the BIOS. Does

Windows attempt to boot at all?

 

More details, please so we can give you focused help.

 

Malke

--

MS-MVP

Elephant Boy Computers

http://www.elephantboycomputers.com

Don't Panic!