Thank you for the reply. The computer in question is my daughter's and I have
been trying to help her with it over the phone. The system had been operating
slow and had poor response. There had been an attempt to add an additional
partition to the had drive, but it was never completed. As a result of not
finishing the partitioning, there was a large section of the hard drive that
was not assigned and unusable. This resulted in constant prompts that there
was not enough free space to complete various functions.
I walked her through the process of reclaiming that unusable space (using
"Partion Commander 10"). After completion, the system reported the full hard
drive space and things worked Ok until the first time that the system was
rebooted. That is when this blank screen with the dashes started. It is
almost as though the system is doing a "Checkdisk", but no prompts only the
white dashes at the bottom of the screen. The system has "Nortons" anti virus
and network protection.
The system seems to work OK once it is finished going through this long
blank screen process. We tried a system restore point, but to no avail. To
complicate things, she can not find her windows disks, however she does have
the product code. (it is an OEM).
Thank you MPW