XP Will not boot. Underscore blinks on the screen.

[Al Can Help]

I woke up this morning to two computers that had been restarted. I've had a
problem with startup hanging on being unable to boot from A drive please
press F1 to continue. That was on my screen. I've checked the boot sequence
but that's another story. Once past that all I'm getting is a blinking
cursor. I've tried rebooting without success. it does allow me to check my
settings (pressing delete). It does not allow me to start in the safe mode
(pressing f8). I'm running XP SP2, MSI with Intel Dual Core. I haven't made
any hardware or software changes. I'm wondering if there is a virus? I did
run a quick scan just yesterday afternoon.
Thanks

 

[John John]

Are *both* of your computers not booting or is there only one not
booting? The most common cause for a boot making it past the POST but
then immediately hanging with a blinking cursor at the upper top left
corner is that there is no active partition on the hard disk. You can
use a Windows 98 boot disk and Fdisk to check the active status of the
partition or you should be able to boot the hard disk by using your
Windows XP cd, once booted you can use the Disk Management tool to check
the active status of the partition.

John

 

[Malke]

I woke up this morning to two computers that had been restarted. I've had
a problem with startup hanging on being unable to boot from A drive please
press F1 to continue. That was on my screen. I've checked the boot
sequence
but that's another story. Once past that all I'm getting is a blinking
cursor. I've tried rebooting without success. it does allow me to check
my
settings (pressing delete). It does not allow me to start in the safe
mode
(pressing f8). I'm running XP SP2, MSI with Intel Dual Core. I haven't
made
any hardware or software changes. I'm wondering if there is a virus? I
did run a quick scan just yesterday afternoon.
Thanks

Does this happen on both computers? When you went into Setup was your hard
drive shown? What other story is there connected with the boot sequence?
That is important because since you mentioned a floppy drive, I'd suggest
making the hard drive first in the boot priority.

It sounds like either your hard drive has died or the boot files are
corrupt, although usually you'd get an error message from the BIOS. Does
Windows attempt to boot at all?

More details, please so we can give you focused help.

Malke