Black screen, flashing cursor?

I've a 3+ year old Dell running XP home. Everything has been working fine. Two days ago, turned on, DELL "splash" screen for a couple of seconds and then black screen with flashing cursor in upper left corner. Nothing happens.

During the "splash" there are two "F" options (F2 and F12 IRRC). One takes me to the bios and the other to a boot options screen. Went to bios and everything looks normal to me. Memory, drives, etc all look right.

The other gives me boot options (floppy, ide, cd rom, etc). I tried to boot to XP installation cd but after a couple of seconds back to black/flashing cursor. Also tried changing the boot order in the bios to get to boot from the cd but same. Would like to get to the cd to run the repair console but no luck.

I downloaded the hard drive diagnostic tool to a floppy and ran it but it didn't find anything except something about "SMART tripped" when it first started?

I took the hard drive out of the Dell and installed it as a slave in another pc. The drive is recognized and I'm able to "view" the files in My Computer so the drive is at least running. Also ran chkdsk on the drive while it was the slave but it still won't do anything in the Dell.

Thanks in advance for your help.

RdJay

 

might want to check your xp cd on another computer to see if it works. You should be getting the "Press any key boot from cd-rom... " .

is the software for the hd on a floppy? or cd-rom. Try booting from another bootable cdrom to make sure it's working.

 

The hd software is on a floppy and it booted up fine. The computer is a Dell and I tried the Windows cd that came with it. Also tried another XP cd I have from my other computer and neither worked. The Dell has two cd drives in it (a player and a burner) and I tried both. I did get the "Press any key...." message when I do the light comes on the cd drive for a few seconds but nothing happens.

 

If anyone is interested I resolved this problem.

I had a cd rom drive and dvd rw drive installed. When the xp installation disk wouldn't run I decided to remove the cd drive as I never used it anyway.

The computer then booted up fine and is working great. I believe the cd rom had died and something in the bios was crashing.

Much easier fix than installing a new hard drive as I was contemplating.

RdJay

 

Thanks for letting us know how you resolved the problem. Appreciated