My HP OmniBook 500, Windows 2000, has worked for many years. A few days ago it stopped booting. After the BIOS blanks the screen, I get a single underscore blinking in the top left. The drive LED is solid blue. And nothing works (I can't hit F8 for example).
I ran IBM drive fitness testing from a floppy, it was fine. I moved the drive to a Linux box, the entire drive is clean and working.
I booted a DOS disk, and did "fdisk /mbr", and the machine booted!
But then I did Windows Update, rebooted, and it is dead again.
Booting the same DOS disks results in a series of pauses, each with a solid blue drive LED. What could be timing out? Can I fix the mbr by taking the drive over to a Linux box?
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