From: greerjohn on
Hi All,

My pc refuses to boot beyond the screen giving bios info, detecting
drives etc. The pc hangs wiht the cursor flashing in the top left
corner of the screen. I did a thorough check on the hard drive using
the (manufacturer's) Western Digital diagnostic software. It passed.
The pc boots fine when I physically change the hard drive to
another.

After trying almost all the 'solutions' found on the internet I do not
know what to do. Any suggestions anyone?

Some things tried included: resetting the bios; interchanging onboard
video with pci video card; removing unnecessary peripherals; using
drivers knowing to be working; restoring to a point 2 weeks earlier
(manually).

(Compaq pres/celeron/512 mb/160 gigs; Windows XP Pro [troubled disk]/
Home [working disk])

Help me, please!

Thanks,

Greer
From: John John - MVP on
greerjohn wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> My pc refuses to boot beyond the screen giving bios info, detecting
> drives etc. The pc hangs wiht the cursor flashing in the top left
> corner of the screen. I did a thorough check on the hard drive using
> the (manufacturer's) Western Digital diagnostic software. It passed.
> The pc boots fine when I physically change the hard drive to
> another.
>
> After trying almost all the 'solutions' found on the internet I do not
> know what to do. Any suggestions anyone?
>
> Some things tried included: resetting the bios; interchanging onboard
> video with pci video card; removing unnecessary peripherals; using
> drivers knowing to be working; restoring to a point 2 weeks earlier
> (manually).
>
> (Compaq pres/celeron/512 mb/160 gigs; Windows XP Pro [troubled disk]/
> Home [working disk])
>
> Help me, please!

We don't know what "all the solutions found on the internet" means...

More likely than not the "Active" partition flag has been removed. If
the computer has a floppy disk drive you can boot the computer with a
Windows 98 Startup diskette and verify/set the active partition flag
with Fdisk. If the computer doesn't have a floppy drive you can mount
the disk in another Windows XP computer and use the built-in Disk
Management tool to set the "Active" partition. To launch the Disk
Management tool enter diskmgmt.msc in the Start Menu Run box.

John