press space it works for me

I think I accidentally left mine in the blinking cursor stage overnight – it never booted the way this guy describes it. But thanks for the tip. I’ll dig through the search a bit and maybe I find something relevant. :)

Just to help you with searching:

“dell boot blinking cursor”

returns 58,000 results. Something there might be relevant. For example one person claims that if you ctrl+alt+delete multiple times after waiting at the cursor that it’ll eventually give you an error message (although his would boot if left alone for 7 minutes at the screen).

Best of luck.

@Ben – nope but I don’t actually own a voltmeter, or whatever you would use in this circumstance. It does make some sense though – I replaced the Video card with a more powerful one and added a secondary HD in that box. But that was like 3 years ago and I haven’t had this problem until this December.

Also, I can easily boot from the CD, and when I do I get full access to the HD. I’m actually backing up my data using Knoppix right now. If this was a power supply issue I don’t think I would be able to do this, no?

Have you checked the rails on the power supply? Make sure you’re getting steady power at the right levels? I saw this sort of wacky behavior w/ a bad power supply once.

Hmm.. First thing I did was to remove all the USB appliances from the damn thing but it didn’t help. I had that happen on another computer with a KVM too. Once I removed the KVM and connected PS2 mouse and keyboard the thing started booting again.

Simillar thing happened to one of my servers at work. I used a 320 GB LaCie drive to do some backups and left it plugged in. When the server rebooted, it wouldn’t come back up until I unplugged the USB drive.

This time it didn’t work. :(

I will try the /sos thing when I get home though. There are some other switches there worth trying like /basevideo, /sageboot and etc. You have given me a glimmer of hope. :)

Thanks for the tip!

My computer does this if you try to boot it with a USB flash drive inserted.

What happens if you (boot with knoppix and) edit the c:\boot.ini file and add /sos to the end of the long line with “Microsoft Windows Professional” in it, so it looks similar to this:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /sos

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLDR for details, but the sos option just gives you more output, so you can see which driver (if any) is giving you grief.