# XP Pro will not boot (flashing cursor)



## smithpd (Sep 27, 2004)

I've read through similar posts but none seem to help.

I have a Win XP Dell that one day after resetting would not boot up. After the bios screen only a flashing cursor on a black screen. Called Dell who simply lead me to reinstall the OS. Before that I tried the recovery console, safe mode, repair installation, et al. The only thing that worked was to reinstall a fresh copy of windows. Fine.

This happened again after a couple weeks after installing SP2. Same results. Reinstalled.

Now I have norton Ghost 9.0 and an image of my hard drive on an external hd. The problem happened again...but aha! I simply restored the prior hd image from Ghost. But the flashing cursor came up again!!! A complete image restore didn't fix the problem! I had to reinstall windows and then pick my files from the Ghost image browser (very time consuming).

What gives? When you do an image restore of the HD, is there like a boot sector or NTFS or something that doesn't get restored that could be the culprit? I read of a problem w/ NT when the Master something file gets fragmented that this could happend, but nothing with XP. I'm getting really good at reinstalling every 2 weeks, but also really sick of it.

Please help.

Thanks,
Phil


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## GingrichHomeSys (Sep 9, 2004)

Have you also reformatted your hard drive? Try that, and if it still boasts the same problem, you may be looking at a faulty hard disk.

Good Luck!


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## smithpd (Sep 27, 2004)

Yes, I reformat every time. This is the 2nd hard drive giving me these problems. I bought it due to problems with the first, so it's brand new. It's gotta be some boot sector or something getting corrupted.

Also, there's gotta be a way to do a full restore w/ Norton Ghost 9.0 without having to install windows first.

Thanks,
Phil


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## gothgirl (Sep 27, 2004)

*The biggest mistake.*

A client had the same issue running XP PRO. In there case it was caused by Noton Anti-Virus 2004 PRO. There are many peeps SCREAMING at Symantec for this problem as the software asks you to delete a security portion of XP Pro in windows before installing...then asks you to re-instal after Norton. 

I removed all Norton products through DOS then did a simple repair from the OS disk. All is good. The only issue after was that XP Office could not find the "Front Page" ap and kept throwing errors when you tried to access Word. I reinstalled office 2000 Premium not XP and all is good!

2000 kicks XP's ***!!! Why not leave it all at 2000 :chgrin:


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## Dr.Watson (Oct 15, 2004)

I don't have a Fix but I do have some input. I work with Norton 2003 a lot and just a few months back I ran into this problem. At work all of the sudden all the images I started to make would not boot (they would stay at the blinking curser) I could still dump an older image to a PC, but none of the new ones I was making would work. I didn't think much of it but then I imaged my Home server, which is RedHat9 and the same thing happened, and this backup technique had worked for me in the past. I tried older images of the Linux server and they worked but any new ones I made didn't... I was not sure what it was causing this problem so I tested it on Windows 98 & win 95 and they all came up with the same problem..... Till this day I have not come up with an answerer but I can tell you that, in my opinion its Ghost. Through my work, We purchased Ghost 8 (since it thought it was the Ghost version I had) and once I created a new image with the New Ghost software the same problem came up with the new images but I could still use the old ones. Ghost has tech-support but you need to purchase it so I'm in the process of the purchasing but there are other issues at my work place that I have to jump through hoops to get it approved.....


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## OnceUponATime (Oct 25, 2004)

I may have a solution. I experienced a similar problem. I had Ghosted a copy my hard drive a few months ago. I recently had to restore from that copy to to my main hard drive. When I tried to reboot, I got nothing but a dark screen and a flashing cursor.

Apparently, Ghost created a new partition for me and made that partition the 'Active' partition. What you need to do is to make Partiton 1 the Active partition using gdisk.exe. 
Step 1: You need to use a boot diskette to boot into DOS. You can make your own boot diskette but I used a boot diskette that I had previously created using GHOST's GUI interface. If you boot up with such a diskette, it runs Ghost on boot-up. I simply Quit out of Ghost into DOS.
Step 2: Use Gdisk.exe to make Partiton 1 the Active partition. I got a copy of gdisk.exe by visiting Symantec's Web site. Enter the following gdisk commands:

gdisk 1 /Status - To see the Disk partitions - You'll likely see the extra small partiton that Ghost made and that small new partition will be marked as 'Active'.

gdisk 1 /act /p:1 - This will make Partition 1 the Active partion. You can now boot up and things will be back to normal. You may first need to enter 'gdisk 1 /mbr' to in re-initialize the boot code in the Master Boot Record for the first disk. However, it worked for me without this extra command.

What I find is that things never work properly if you use Ghost's GUI interface, especially if you don't choose to make an exact copy of disk to disk. The most full-proof and troublefree method to ghost is to do a Disk to Disk copy in DOS. Simply enter:

gdisk -clone,-copy,src=1,dst=2 -FDSP -SZEE


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## noblewarren (Oct 22, 2004)

*any answer?*

Did the final post actually work for this problem? I have experienced something identical to this, i deleted my 'restore it' program and now it wont even boot passed 'searching for boot record OEM-0 ok' shall i simply follow previous advise? any help appreciated.

thanks.


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## OnceUponATime (Oct 25, 2004)

I'm not sure if noblewarren's message was directed towards me or to anyone else who may have tried my proposed solution. I just wanted to emphasize that my problem arised from using ghost in the manner that I described. What I had in common with some of you was the flashing cursor and Ghost and the proposed solution worked for me. Other varities of a problem with a flashing cursor may be caused by other problems. Good luck.


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## lisa_zhang (Dec 20, 2007)

From my experience your hard drive has corrupt file system when you backup via Ghost 9.0. 
My laptop fell down ground, after I backup it to image file via Ghost 9.0 sector by sector and loaded it to another laptop. It will not start Windows XP and showed up "STOP 0x0000007B (0xF78E2640, 0xC0000034, 
0x00000000, 0x00000000) ". 

But when I created one image in a good laptop and restore it to same laptop. It could start Windows XP.

Lisa


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## m2classics (Feb 8, 2008)

I had the same problem (flashing cursor after ghosting from image)
Tried ghosting disk to disk and everything went back to normal


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## azzarooroo (Mar 11, 2008)

Solution for this problem is to exit ghost once it has loaded up. From dos prompt type ghost -ir (raw disk image). Takes longer but it fixes this problem.


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