horatio1996
Posts: 7 +0
About six months ago, my machine started giving me a black screen during the boot up process. As soon as I turn it on, I see the manufacturers logo (dell) for about 1 second, then it gives me a black screen with a flashing white cursor in the upper left hand corner. This screen last about 3-4 minutes, then it boots windows XP normally.
Last week I was in the room while it was booting, and I noticed that it was accessing the network during the black screen portion of boot up (activity light on cable modem was flashing, alot), which got me motivated to fix it. (not sure what that means). I ran virus scanners (McAfee) which found nothing, but I did check the log file in my scanner which shows that my auto virus screening is diabled everytime I boot the machine????
Checked partitions on the hard drive, found 2- my c:, and an unnamed partition of about 30 megs. (I dont remember putting a second partitions on there - would the manufacturer put that there to use as a virtual memory??)
Deleted all partitions and reformated the hard drive yesterday, and reloaded XP, but that still didn't solve it.
Loaded and booted the Windows Recovery Console, and ran the FIXMBR command twice, both times I get the message that "It appears your MBR is corrupted" or something like that but it doesn't fix it.
Do I have some sort of virus in the MBR that my virus software (McAffee, was up to date before my reformating) never caught or is this a hardware issue- something on the hard drive or mobo going bad?
I'm reloading some of the drivers tongiht, will reload McAffee and run it in safe mode to see if it can detect anything.
Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.
System - Dell 4600 from 2003, Pentium 2, with 512 megs ram, running WinXP
Last week I was in the room while it was booting, and I noticed that it was accessing the network during the black screen portion of boot up (activity light on cable modem was flashing, alot), which got me motivated to fix it. (not sure what that means). I ran virus scanners (McAfee) which found nothing, but I did check the log file in my scanner which shows that my auto virus screening is diabled everytime I boot the machine????
Checked partitions on the hard drive, found 2- my c:, and an unnamed partition of about 30 megs. (I dont remember putting a second partitions on there - would the manufacturer put that there to use as a virtual memory??)
Deleted all partitions and reformated the hard drive yesterday, and reloaded XP, but that still didn't solve it.
Loaded and booted the Windows Recovery Console, and ran the FIXMBR command twice, both times I get the message that "It appears your MBR is corrupted" or something like that but it doesn't fix it.
Do I have some sort of virus in the MBR that my virus software (McAffee, was up to date before my reformating) never caught or is this a hardware issue- something on the hard drive or mobo going bad?
I'm reloading some of the drivers tongiht, will reload McAffee and run it in safe mode to see if it can detect anything.
Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.
System - Dell 4600 from 2003, Pentium 2, with 512 megs ram, running WinXP
