Black Screen Blinking

[chrisredfield93]

my laptop has developed a fault yestreday and now when i turn it on it has a black screen with a blinking curour flashed.

nothing wrong with the hdd since i connected to another pc with another hdd.

i tried the reocvoer cd and it booted and did a restore and but when i boot from hdd again

it still black screen blinking.

any tips on how to resolve this issue and it out of warrenty

[Dom_]

Can you describe the fault a bit more?

Can you get into the bios?

What OS are you using?

[chrisredfield93]

yes i can get into the bios and using Windows Vista, but i have already attempted the recovry program and that commpted and it still there

[Dom_]

My old vista machine did this, recovery didn't help either... Is there anything on there you need? Probably worth re-installing from scratch :-)

Might be time to upgrade to 7...?

[chrisredfield93]

the recovery disc has worked in the past when i needd to restore so it aint a dodgey recovery disc

[Dom_]

Try changing the SATA mode in the bios, maybe the recovery install didn't finish properly

[chrisredfield93]

there no optons there but it an WMI image on a cd and it has been working fine in the pass and i havent done any changes as i know of and well i dont seem any hardware fault since have used avg and kapersky rescue disc to see if there was any virues befrore doing the recovery. it looks it jkust happen over night, can any hardware faults cause this?

[chrisredfield93]

can this also be a hard drive fault since phone up the laptop support ad they saying it seem to be a hard dive fault or corrupt files

i cant see neither of this since i see the hard drive in the bios and i have connected the hard drive using a usb cable adapter to another computer and i can read and see all files.

and the corrupt files cant see this since i have used the recovery disc to replace them

[Michael]

Try resetting your BIOS to defaults and if you can locate the boot sequence. It should typically be CD-ROM > HDD > Floppy for example.

The blinking cursor you describe could also be the computer 'attempting' to boot from a removable device, such as a USB memory stick. Disconnect all USB type devices and see if this makes any difference.

[DAZZD88]

Try resetting your BIOS to defaults and if you can locate the boot sequence. It should typically be CD-ROM > HDD > Floppy for example.

The blinking cursor you describe could also be the computer 'attempting' to boot from a removable device, such as a USB memory stick. Disconnect all USB type devices and see if this makes any difference.

I'd say ^this^ is a good start.

When I have suffered the blinking cursor in the past, it's usually a matter of recreating the MBR and BOOT.INI but obviously Vista doesn't use these. I'd suggest a bootable disc where you can run a disk checking application on your system/boot partition.