Black screen of death?

[slayer202]

I have a laptop that I can't get to boot. It posts, and then goes to a Black screen with a blinking white cursor on the top left. I am guessing there are a million different causes, but any help is appreciated.

 

[secretanchitman]

try booting in safe mode to see if it boots.

if not, you may have a corrupted win xp (or whatever windows) install.

 

[slayer202]

Well I can't even get to safe mode or anything. right after it posts it sends me to the black screen. I tried booting from an xp cd but no luck. Windows 2000 is what is currently installed.

Anything I can do?

 

[Jjoshua2]

Can you get into bios or is it before that too?

 

[slayer202]

Originally posted by: Jjoshua2
Can you get into bios or is it before that too?

I can get into bios

 

[btcomm1]

Is your bios set to boot off of the cd first? I imagine that it is but I thought I might as well ask. Do you have any usb or any other devices plugged into the laptop? Even a mouse? If so unplug all of that and see what happens. If none of that helps if you have more then 1 stick of ram in your computer, try taking one out, if the same thing happens then try taking the other. Also since you can get into the bios you may want to see if there is a setting to reset to bios defaults.

 

[slayer202]

alright will do :/

 

[pcgeek11]

My Laptop Dell Inspiron 5100 does exactly the same thing ( black screen blinking curser in the top left corner ) IF i have a cheap USB drive enclosure I own plugged in when booting ( this includes CD, Floppy, Hard drive boots ). After it is up and running it works fine. All of my other USB devices work fine when booting. I marked it off as a cheap USB device.

pcgeek11

 

[Jaepheth]

Blinking cursor eh?

Reboot worked, system's ready. But the power loss probably tripped the breakers, you'll have to reset them manually...

...watch for velociraptors...