System hangs after bios. Black screen with flashing cursor.

N

neiljung

Last thing I did on it was remove the temp fix for the latest
vulnerability, with the intention of getting the official microsoft
patch this morning. Bios loads fine, then before the XP splash-screen
it just goes to a black screen with a flashing _ cursor top-left.
It's a new one on me. Google hasn't been much help, other than I know
other people have had similar problems with a variey of windows
installs.

I used Acronis trueimage to clone my old drive onto the WD160B I got at
Xmas, and its been running great since. I'm right now using the drive I
cloned, with the WD160 slaved to it. All my data is fine, I've been
burning it off all day onto dvd-r's, but I presume something has gone
corrupt in the drives Windows installation. It's obviously nothing else
if the old drive it's cloned from is working perfectly, although it's
not as fast...which is a bitch.

To be honest I've not done much so far other than try to restart it a
dozen times, then I swapped out the drives to see if it would work with
the other one. I didn't check to see if I could get the Windows boot
options screen, but I have a feeling I won't be able to as I'm sure
windows is not even getting that far. I'll be doing whatever is
necessary tomorrow when I get up. Any ideas what could have gone wrong?
Advice on how to fix it?

Surely someones had this problem before and resolved it. Idealy I want
to avoid a recovery install, assuming I can boot ok from the cd...
Thanks in advance.
 
M

Malke

Last thing I did on it was remove the temp fix for the latest
vulnerability, with the intention of getting the official microsoft
patch this morning. Bios loads fine, then before the XP splash-screen
it just goes to a black screen with a flashing _ cursor top-left.
It's a new one on me. Google hasn't been much help, other than I know
other people have had similar problems with a variey of windows
installs.

I used Acronis trueimage to clone my old drive onto the WD160B I got
at Xmas, and its been running great since. I'm right now using the
drive I cloned, with the WD160 slaved to it. All my data is fine, I've
been burning it off all day onto dvd-r's, but I presume something has
gone corrupt in the drives Windows installation. It's obviously
nothing else if the old drive it's cloned from is working perfectly,
although it's not as fast...which is a bitch.

To be honest I've not done much so far other than try to restart it a
dozen times, then I swapped out the drives to see if it would work
with the other one. I didn't check to see if I could get the Windows
boot options screen, but I have a feeling I won't be able to as I'm
sure windows is not even getting that far. I'll be doing whatever is
necessary tomorrow when I get up. Any ideas what could have gone
wrong? Advice on how to fix it?

If the problem occurred immediately after applying an MS security patch,
call Microsoft. There is no charge for support related to security
patches.

Customers in the U.S. and Canada can receive technical support from
Microsoft Product Support Services at 1-866-PCSAFETY. There is no
charge for support calls that are associated with security updates.

If you aren't in the US or Canada, I don't have a phone number for
Product Support Services, but here's an international "contact us"
link:

http://support.microsoft.com/common/international.aspx

Malke
 

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