Solved: Black Screen Blinking Cursor on XP
I am working on a customer’s computer here that has a fairly serious virus infection. Thinking I had cleared the virus, when I put the HDD back into her machine it would just log me out as soon as I logged in. Things went downhill from there and I ended up having to restore her disk back to the way it was when she brought it in and start all over again. After clearing the viruses for a second time (this time correctly), the machine would not boot. When I turned it on, all I got was a black screen with a blinking cursor.
I tried booting to the XP installation disc (after breaking the Admin password using EBCD from here) and using FIXMBR and FIXBOOT but this was to no avail. I checked the BOOT.INI file which was OK and I tried restoring her drive both with its original MBR and the standard Windows XP MBR – no dice. Then I remembered a tool I had used a while back for a mysteriously unbootable computer that was giving me the “NTLDR missing” error. In this case I was not getting any error message, just the black screen blinking cursor, but the two problems felt the same to me. Sure enough my NTDLR fix CD repaired the problem on the first try. You can download the black screen blinking cursor fix from here.
The author, Mike Comer, does a nice job of explaining how this works technically so I won’t repeat it here. I will recommend that if this fixes your problem that you make a small donation to Mike as I have for his excellent help.
Edit 26 August 2010: I have had a couple of Dell computers here this week with the same problem. I am convinced that it has to do with a failing hard drive. If I am right, the fix for this problem of course is to replace the hard drive. One work-around that has been reported to work is to remove the hard drive and do a defrag on it, then put it back in the problem machine (be sure to run CHKDSK /F both prior and after the defrag). Another work-around is to reformat and re-install. Both of these have worked but I have some doubts about whether they are good long-term solutions. Possibly worth a try though.
