XP boots to black screen-with white pointer

[dok0619]

I have an old Athlon 650 on an old Abit K7 Raid board with 384 meg of ram with XP Pro loaded on it. Was working fine till I had it hooked up to a KVM switch for about a week to toggle back and forth between it and another pc. One day tried switching over to it and screen was black, but I could see and move the cursor. Tried rebooting and goes through with no error beeps,goes past the XP splash screen and then stops at the black screen where I assume my logon icons are. I have tried safemode and it does exactly the same thing except I can also see the white text all around the screen saying "safe Mode" but the rest of the screen is black. I reseated the vid card, tried another vid card and still does the same thing. Reseated my ram and other pci cards as well, but to no avail... Can NE1 help please?!

 

[DieHardware]

Was (and is) it hooked up to the KVM when you did your trouble shooting?

 

[dok0619]

It was initially, then I disconnected it and hooked straight up to monitor and kb etc.. either way it does exactly the same thing. I have tried changing bios to boot cd first and stick xp disk in to see if I can boot and try some sort of repair or restore option, but it keeps going straight to windows instead. I have tried sticking my 2nd hard drive that I use for storage in as master and boot to cd and I get error message "remove disk or media and hit enter to continue"...

this is nuts! I can see the pointer, move it even, so its not locked up..just BLACK...

 

[dok0619]

Well..I tried hooking hard drive up to another pc and was getting bsods and eventually I formatted it through XPs disk management tool. Tried putting it back in the old pc and now I get "NTLDR is missing" ! No matter what I do in the bios I cannot get the pc to boot to cd or floppy first...

 

[DieHardware]

Do you have more than one ODD in your system? Perhaps it boots off a different drive.

 

[dok0619]

I tried two different hard drives...first got the NTLDR missing error after formatting it, then I took a second hard drive and hooked it up to another pc and installed XP on it. Then tried to hook it up to the other pc and when I reboot it flashes past the bios and just freezes on a black screen. Power and HD lites stay lit. For some reason now I cant get it to boot to CD or FLoppy now.

 

[DieHardware]

Originally posted by: dok0619
I tried two different hard drives...first got the NTLDR missing error after formatting it, then I took a second hard drive and hooked it up to another pc and installed XP on it. Then tried to hook it up to the other pc and when I reboot it flashes past the bios and just freezes on a black screen. Power and HD lites stay lit. For some reason now I cant get it to boot to CD or FLoppy now.

No no, Optical Disk Drive i.e. burners CD/DVD-ROMs. If you have more than one in your system try the one that the motherboard boots off of.

 

[dok0619]

Sorry.. yes I did try both my burner and regular cd rom.....nothing.. just goes right on to loading XP then black screen. I disconnected everything but 1 hd and one optical drive then tried the disconnecting those and using the hard drive and optical drive, making sure to set master, etc. Bios comes up fine, everything is identified correctly in bios and it shows cdrom-boot 1, hdd0-boot 2 and floppy*-boot 3. But now it just locks up without even a pointer anymore like its not loading at all...

 

[dok0619]

ok.. update. After unplugging the PSU and taking the cmos battery out for about 5 minutes, I was able to boot to cd and reinstall XP. But...it is still acting flaky. If i restart from XP it restarts fine. If I power off completely and try to power on again it just sits there..no boot screen, nothing..no post or error beeps... If I unplug the PSU cord from back of pc and back in again, then power on it will boot fine! Any ideas wth is wrong now??

 

[DieHardware]

Are you over clocking or perhaps an overheating issue? Have you visually inspected the motherboard for any bad caps, etc?

 

[snidy1]

Try a differant power supply

 

[dok0619]

Update: After downloading all the updates and patches from MS, the cold booting problem seems to have mysteriously cleared up.(Hopefully) At least I have cold booted it about a half a dozen times now to install software updates etc and it has booted first try.

One problem still left.. the floppy drive does not seem to work now. At first it the light was staying on all the time like it was plugged in upside down, but I checked the connections and there is only one way to connect it. After patches and updates the light doesnt stay on, but any disk I put in will not show up and it says to insert a floppy disk.

***This board is not overclocked at all... die temp is running 37-39C which is excellent on air. Board does not appear damaged at all nor do any of the components. Its a mystery to me what has happened to make this thing act the way it has been doing lately..****