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On Start Up: Black Screen With Blinking Cursor

Tags:
  • Cursor
  • BIOS
  • SSD
  • Business Computing
Last response: in Business Computing
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April 2, 2013 6:52:31 PM

The only way I can get my PC to start is to go through bios and select my SSD, and once started I have access to everything on the main hardrive. But if I try and start on my main hardrive it just goes back to the black screen with a blinking cursor.

I do not know what other information you guys need so just let me know.

More about : start black screen blinking cursor

April 3, 2013 7:07:34 AM

Usually when I get the blinking cursor it's because the computer is trying to boot from a device that isn't bootable, so it's just stuck there. For instance, if you have a USB flash drive plugged in to the computer, sometimes that will automatically pop to the front of your boot order. When your computer starts up, it will try to boot to this USB flash drive first, which just gives you a blinking cursor. Be sure when you are changing your boot order in the BIOS, that you also remove any unnecessary connections like USB drives, and I've even once before seen a printer cause this same issue.

The other possibility is failing drive. If you have the boot order set properly, and it is trying to load from the proper device, but it's just giving you a blinking cursor forever, then something has happened to the drive or the underlying OS boot record that is preventing the operating system from loading. This might be harder to diagnose, because it could be hardware or it could be software. There is a utility on the Hiren's BootCD that we use called HDAT which can check the status of a hard drive (SMART errors and such) as well as scan or and possibly fix bad sectors. This can give you either an indication of a drive failure, or if there's something hardware-wise that can be solved. However, you said that you have a SSD and I do not believe HDAT will work for any repairs or other testing besides detecting any SMART errors. Pretty much when an SSD does go bad, it's permanent.
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April 5, 2013 7:57:47 PM

tshelton1232 said:
The only way I can get my PC to start is to go through bios and select my SSD, and once started I have access to everything on the main hardrive. But if I try and start on my main hardrive it just goes back to the black screen with a blinking cursor.

I do not know what other information you guys need so just let me know.


Sounds like you have Windows installed on the SSD and the other drive either got wiped, is damaged, or lost it's partition info. What happened before this started? Where you messing around with a dual boot or something?
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