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I came home from work and my desk top had a black screen with a flashing cursor in top left corner!!!! I am unable to access safe mode using F8, running windows vista. Has this ever happened to anyone?? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

How comfortable are you inside the computer?

Rue wrote:I came home from work and my desk top had a black screen with a flashing cursor in top left corner!!!! I am unable to access safe mode using F8, running windows vista. Has this ever happened to anyone?? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Do you see POST (Power On Self Test) when you power on the machine? Do you see the Starting Windows Pic?

And the most important question....do you have a backup?

This has happened to me with XP and I had to reload XP to fix it....

fastkart wrote:How comfortable are you inside the computer?

I've only been inside to upgrade the memory, that's about the only thing I have done inside the computer. What did you have in mind??

hoofarted wrote:

Rue wrote:I came home from work and my desk top had a black screen with a flashing cursor in top left corner!!!! I am unable to access safe mode using F8, running windows vista. Has this ever happened to anyone?? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Do you see POST (Power On Self Test) when you power on the machine? Do you see the Starting Windows Pic?

And the most important question....do you have a backup?

How's it going Hoofarted? I am not getting the POST message, when it's powered on, all that you see is the Dell logo Not the starting Windows pic. Then the screen will go black and a cursor will be flashing in the top left corner. F8 does not work to start in safe mode.
I do have most of our documents backed up for the most part I will lose some information if i have to do a full restore.

Mik329 wrote:This has happened to me with XP and I had to reload XP to fix it....

Mik329,

How do I get the computer to read the restore disk?? I put the disk in and powered on the computer but it did not read the disk.

hit tab or escape when the dell screen comes up to view POST and drive data. chances are it will say it cannot detect you harddrive, if this is the case you need a new drive. If it says "inaccessable boot device" and "ntldr missing" you need to format and reload windows. Do yourself a favor and download "seatools" fro seagates website and burn it to a cd. boot to that cd on the problem computer and run a full test, if it fails you need a new drive, if it passes just reload windows. It is common for viruses to cause a problem like this when the kernel is infected, so if the drive tests good, it is probably infected, so you would want to format it anyway.
also, you boot order probably isn't set to try the CD before the hard drive, on Dells, I believe there is a message to press f10 to select a boot device, or you can go into the BIOS and manually configure the boot devices.
so, yeah, the first thing I'd do is make sure the bios is detecting the drive.

Thanks everyone for all of your input and help!! I got her up and running again. The Video Card was bad... I installed a updated version of Norton as well.