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I'm stumped! (POST's but won't boot)

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lucas21

Registered
Joined
Jul 8, 2006
Location
MN
I'm rocking a Dell Inspiron 9100 laptop running XP Home. Hard drive is a WD 160GB and just over a year old. Reformatted last week and everything was fine. Reinstalled a program (Blackberry Desktop Manager) and it asked to restart for changes to take effect. I restarted, it POSTed, but then went to the blinking cursor and won't go any farther. I cannot even get the Windows recovery CD to load. It will prompt to press any key, I press a key and it goes to the flashing cursor.

Through my testing I've made these findings:

1. The BIOS is detecting the HD just fine.
2. Attempting to boot without the drive installed gets the "no primary HD detected"
3. Another previously imaged WD HD boots up just fine in the same machine.
4. The machine will also boot Backtrack off of a USB flash drive.
5. The HD was accessible when placed in an external enclosure.
6. I put the HD into another nearly identical machine and it also got the flashing cursor and also could not access the Windows recovery CD.

I will also add that I tested the Windows recovery CD in a currently working PC and it loaded up just fine, eliminating the possibility of the CD being at fault for that particular observation.


I'm stumped! Any suggestions or ideas?

Thanks,
Lucas
 
No kidding.. Where's our manners???:shrug:
Can you boot from your cd/dvd player?
If so, maybe run the Western Digital diagnostics on the hdd. http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?level1=7&lang=en

I've booted Ubuntu off the CD as well as Backtrack and both can access the HD in question. I just cannot boot Windows off of the HD (only OS on the partition). I'll look into the WD diagnostics but if it helps Spinrite errored out.
 
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