"easy transfer" disabled my bootup - flashing cursor syndrome

surfer99 · 03-27-2008, 05:47 PM

I have a compaq presario F572US or F500 series for short. I get a flashing cursor when I boot ... here is what happened...

I recently upgraded my laptop harddrive to 160Gb. I thought that I would try vista's "easy transfer" program to see what would be transferred to my new drive ... possibly making a bootable drive just like my old 80, as this was my goal. This program wrote to the new hard drive, (as an external USB drive), the compressed data, but then I thought I could expand it on the hard drive as an external USB. It turns out that you can only expand the data on the local C:drive of the computer. So the data began expanding to the current C: drive. This should not be a problem as these files are only a copy of files from the same harddrive they were copied from... right!! Well, apparently something had changed because now it will not boot up. It sits there for 15 minutes with a flashing cursor in the top left corner. The F5 did not work, apparently the program does not get that far. I then used the vista install disk to get to system recovery but it could not fix the problem. I gave it 4 attempts. I tried the system restore option, but again it did not resolve my problem (even though it said it sucessfully restored an earlier time). I loaded vista onto my new harddrive and it works fine, so there is no hardware issue, only whatever the easy tranfer did to kill my bootup.

Also, the installation disk would only allow vista to do a clean install...not an overwrite of files. Thanks Vista!

-I did not do this because I would lose all my previous installations.

I do not want to start over with all the installations and settings. Can someone tell me what to try to get this old harddrive working again.

P.S. I was told that Norton Ghost can transfer the data over to the new hard drive and be bootable, but, of course, only if it is working.

03-27-2008, 05:47 PM	#1 (permalink)
surfer99 Registered User Join Date: Mar 2008 Posts: 2 OS: vista home premium	"easy transfer" disabled my bootup - flashing cursor syndrome I have a compaq presario F572US or F500 series for short. I get a flashing cursor when I boot ... here is what happened... I recently upgraded my laptop harddrive to 160Gb. I thought that I would try vista's "easy transfer" program to see what would be transferred to my new drive ... possibly making a bootable drive just like my old 80, as this was my goal. This program wrote to the new hard drive, (as an external USB drive), the compressed data, but then I thought I could expand it on the hard drive as an external USB. It turns out that you can only expand the data on the local C:drive of the computer. So the data began expanding to the current C: drive. This should not be a problem as these files are only a copy of files from the same harddrive they were copied from... right!! Well, apparently something had changed because now it will not boot up. It sits there for 15 minutes with a flashing cursor in the top left corner. The F5 did not work, apparently the program does not get that far. I then used the vista install disk to get to system recovery but it could not fix the problem. I gave it 4 attempts. I tried the system restore option, but again it did not resolve my problem (even though it said it sucessfully restored an earlier time). I loaded vista onto my new harddrive and it works fine, so there is no hardware issue, only whatever the easy tranfer did to kill my bootup. Also, the installation disk would only allow vista to do a clean install...not an overwrite of files. Thanks Vista! -I did not do this because I would lose all my previous installations. I do not want to start over with all the installations and settings. Can someone tell me what to try to get this old harddrive working again. P.S. I was told that Norton Ghost can transfer the data over to the new hard drive and be bootable, but, of course, only if it is working.