Blank screen with flashing cursor in the top left

[studleylee]

Hello,
I have a Dell laptop Inspiron 8500 that I used extensively for work. 2ghz cpu P4m, 2gig ram, 160gig hitachi HD.

A couple of times in the past few months it has occasionally came up with only a flashing cursor in the top left. Now it does it once a week at least. I've cannot boot into safe mode. The bios seetings seem ok. I can only boot from a bootable ISO CD.

To workaround so far, when this happens: I remove the laptop drive then use anouther computer to read the drive using a usb to mini IDE adapter to read off my recent work, I run the Hitachi factory tests for this drive via bootable ISO: It always passes fine. The drive reads fine too.
Then I use "Acronis True Image home" to restore the drive back to the last backup( which I do 2 weekly now because of this ) It takes 3hours to restore the image, and then I copy back my recent work , and all works fine for about a week.

I bought "ASO advanced Sytem Optimizer" and cleaned up the registry, and defragged the drive using "AShampoo Magic Defreg". I was excited because I thought it was a registry problem or fragmentation issue.

It worked fine all week and seems faster even. I was happy.

Today it did the same no-boot thing when I when to to boot up. Blank screen with flashing cursor in the top left.

It really seems like something is killing either the registry, mbr, or bootloader on powerdown.

I'm running the Dell diags disk and it all passes. I can boot and restore the
partition using Acronis. I'm at a loss... Thanks for any help. Otherwise I'm going to buy a new laptop, but I was hoping to put that off until macbook pros drop in price. Then I'm going virtual machines w/ 4gig ram. Thanks!!! -Lee Studley

[studleylee]

Lee Studley's solution.


02.15.2008 at 08:38PM MST, ID: 20907996

******SOLUTION******:This website and faq pretty much sums up what I've been experiencing.
http://www.48bitlba.com
http://www.48bitlba.com/faq.htm

My
current hypothesis is the 137gig limit in the bios, in coordination
with the XP SP2's ability to go above 137gigs. Using acronis I was able
to transfer upgrade( awhile back ) from an 80gig drive to this 160gig
drive. All was well until these issues popped up. I think as the drive
utililization grew, I started having problems with my bios's lack of
LBA48( >137 gig ) support. It's almost like I'm getting address
aliasing/wrap around problems after the drive started filling up. For
the Inspiron 8500 there is no bios yet that handles LBA48 correctly, so
I downsized my partition to 100gigs using Disk Manager and all seems to
be well so far. If you search on this problem, it seems it's common on
a lot of laptops that were made before 2004 and/or people not updating
their bios. I've not heard this solution, so I hope it gets
investigated more. I welcome comments on this !! -Lee


******SOLUTION******:This website and faq pretty much sums up what I've been experiencing.
http://www.48bitlba.com/faq.htm