Question

Blinking cursor after bios screen on boot up

Asked by: Gwodan

My Dell Latitude D810 is not booting past the bios screen to XP and gives me only a blinking cursor in the upper left of the screen.
System ran fine at shut down - hybernate last night, and problem arose at boot up this am.
HD is a WD 160g and fairly new and I can access it on another machine with out issue.

Tried to boot dell with USB enclosure and HD but it gave an error: "Kernal_Stack_in_Page_Error"
Stop: 0x00000077 (0xc000000e, 0xc000000e, 0x00000000, 0x1A038000

Need to get this going - backing up hd now, but don't want to do a full install if I don't have to.
I just did that a couple of months ago.

Thanks,
Lynne

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Asked On
2009-07-26 at 13:36:04ID24601462
Tags

blinking cursor

,

boot error

,

dell

Topics

Microsoft Hardware

,

Microsoft Operating Systems

,

General Laptop

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
11

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Answers

 

by: jamietonerPosted on 2009-07-26 at 14:07:10ID: 24947443

When you get the drive installed back into the machine(only modified versions of xp will boot from usb), boot to the xp cd and into the recovery console and run a fixboot and fixmbr.

 

by: GwodanPosted on 2009-07-27 at 15:24:47ID: 24956528

Thank you,
I reinstalled the drive and  booted from the cd.
selected the first option to recover - and it was asking me for an admin password - which I don't recall installing and it won't let me get by that point -

The next thing I tried was to go to the second option for recovery, ran that, but still won't boot further than the blinking cursor.

put back in usb enclosure and ran checkdisk/r and it found no errors.  

Is there a way I can run fixboot and fixmbr from otherthan the recovery console?

I am about 2 steps from the rebuild process.

 

by: GwodanPosted on 2009-07-27 at 15:35:33ID: 24956586

I am wondering if they way I shutt it down or that it failed could have damaged the HD or could it have been marginal to fail in the first place?  
Basically if I get this fixed, what kind of chances are there it will happen again - soon?

 

by: jamietonerPosted on 2009-07-27 at 16:57:39ID: 24956950

"and it was asking me for an admin password" leave it blank and press enter and it should let you continue if no password was ever setup. If its just the boot files then chances are slim of it happening again anytime soon, if the drive is failing these steps may not work at all. To test the drive get the UBCD and run a diag on the drive.

 

by: justintiernanPosted on 2009-07-28 at 13:33:53ID: 24964920

You might try taking out a stick of ram one at a time just to see if it boots then, it may now be a drive issue at all. Also if you don't know your admin password there a all kinds of free tools out there you can download and boot off of the cd you made to reset it. Ultimate Technicians boot disc and windows password recovery are a couple of my favs.

 

by: GwodanPosted on 2009-07-28 at 14:14:45ID: 24965280

was able to get UBCD and UBCD4WIN and found drive is stuck in hybernation.
rest of hardware is fine - tested with alternate drive.

Was able to get into system from recovery consul and in process of chkdsk /r and fixboot and fixmbr.

is this what I need to do to fix the drive stuck in hybernate?

Thanks

 

by: GwodanPosted on 2009-07-28 at 17:21:10ID: 24966352

Ran Fixboot and fixmbr no change.

don't think it is a hardware problem because I had a back up drive and reloaded windows on it and it was booting fine.  

 

by: jamietonerPosted on 2009-07-28 at 17:30:41ID: 24966390

Yep looks like a bad hard drive if the power mode is stuck in hibernate.

 

by: jamietonerPosted on 2009-07-28 at 17:32:31ID: 24966399

Odd that it worked attached to another system(forgot about that). If you got the data off of it try a clean reinstall on the drive with a full format.

 

by: GwodanPosted on 2009-07-28 at 17:35:48ID: 24966410

Thanks Jamietoner -
That is what I think is left to do as well.

 

by: GwodanPosted on 2009-08-12 at 15:51:19ID: 25083897

case closed - thank you for your help.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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