Solved: Black Screen Blinking Cursor II
As anyone who has had this problem and consulted Google can attest, there are a lot of reasons why a PC may boot to a black screen with a blinking cursor. I have a list of 15 fixes that I use when I get a Vista computer with this problem (I’ll publish it some day). I recently wrote a post about solving the blinking cursor problem in Windows 7 and wanted to follow it up with another solution that is pretty simple to implement and worth trying if you have this problem in XP, Vista or Windows 7.
This morning I was testing a composite video to USB connector on my Windows XP laptop. I needed to copy some files from a USB thumb drive over to the laptop. I rebooted the machine after installing the drivers and accidently left the USB thumb drive connected. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem but this particular thumb drive is a boot drive for Ubuntu Linux and so my machine accidentally booted into that instead of back into XP. To make a long story short, I got impatient with the shut-down process in Ubuntu and hit the power switch before it was completely shut down. The result was that my trusty Thinkpad would no longer boot, it just sat there with a blinking cursor. I got a similar result trying to boot to Safe Mode.
OK, I admit that a little panic set in as I thought about all the un-backed-up pictures of my daughter on that drive, but I kept my cool (I ain’t no fool), let me tell you what happened then. I removed the drive from the laptop and attached it to a SATA-to-USB cable and connected to my Windows 7 machine and ran a CHKDSK on the drive. Sure enough, that was the problem, CHKDSK found a few errors in the file system, fixed them and upon reinsertion, the drive booted like a champ.
Conclusion: Quite often you can start to solve a compound problem by doing a CHKDSK on your boot drive. If your PC has recently had a BSOD or shut down abruptly, and then subsequently will not boot, it may have hosed the file system, run a CHKDSK. You don’t even have to take the disk out of the machine the way that I did to accomplish this. You can use your Windows XP installation disk to boot to the Recovery Console and run a CHKDSK from there. Vista and Windows 7 installation DVD let you boot to a pretty nice set of tools that allow you to open a recovery window as well (just open a Command Prompt). Just put your installation disc in the drive and turn on the computer, you might have to hit F12 to get the boot menu to force it to boot from the CD/DVD player.
