Black Screen W/ Flashing white underscore, unable to boot, HOW TO RECOVER WITH NO INSTALLATION DISK!?

Derkalerka

Reputable
Feb 10, 2015
2
0
4,510
hi,

recently my hard drive just stopped working. when i booted it up one day it went start the black screen with a white underscore flashing in the top left hand corner of the screen. if i let it wait there then after a while i will get either one of two messages, unable to boot operating system please inset boot-able media then press any button, or unable to load operating system, press control alt delete to restart. i have no installation dick to repair, well i have a boot some boot leg ones and one for another computer that i dont have but when i try and boot from the installation disk for another computer and i click on the repair and go through the process, the operating system is not recognized in the recovery process thus making it useless i think, same goes for the boot leg disks. i do have the option to use another hard drive but i would rather recover the one i have instead.

any help at all would be awesome, please reply soon.
 
Solution
Make sure that you didn't accidentally leave some USB flash drive plugged in. Some computers will give you this exact error when one is left plugged in as they try to boot off of it and will not boot correctly until the drive is removed.

cTs Corvette

Distinguished
Aug 17, 2011
214
0
18,710
Make sure that you didn't accidentally leave some USB flash drive plugged in. Some computers will give you this exact error when one is left plugged in as they try to boot off of it and will not boot correctly until the drive is removed.
 
Solution