Hanging Black Screen At Start Up, Need Help

[Ganu]

I have a DEll Dimension 4600. Everytime I boot the computer the usual screen displaying the Dell logo appears and then the screen goes black except for a flickering cursor in the upper left corner. This lasts for about 5-10 min, then windows loads without a problem. My computer has had years' worth of spyware and viruses and somebody previously installed a non-Genuine version of Windows XP Professional on my computer. I finally formatted my hard drive and I reinstalled Windows using my the Windows XP Home CD which came with my computer. All of the viruses are gone and so is the non-Genuine issue, but the black screen still persists. Here is the page from Microsoft which seems to describe my exact problem, but none of their solutions have helped.

support. microsoft. com/kb/314503

Basically what they said is to either reinstall Windows, which I did, or fix something in the boot record using FIXMBR and FIXBOOT, which I did following their instructions. They also said the partition might be bad. I do not know how to check if the partition is bad or not, but it seems to be fine. Please help. It is very annoying, especially since I have to keep installing Windows updates after formatting and it takes 10 min to restart each time. I'm beginning to suspect my hardware videocard etc..., but I'm not really sure. Also, this may be just a coincidence, but it just so happens that I first noticed this problem exactly when I first started getting messages that my Windows wasn't genuine.

 

[brucethetech]

if it happened even after you did a COMPLETE reformat and reinstall its probably not the installation since the master boot record is rewritten at that point. you probably have a hardware issue. check dells website to see if your hard drive has any firmware updates.

 

[Ganu]

Yes, thank you. I went on the Dell website and reinstalled BIOS. Now it loads normally.