My son's PC (Dell 8250) has been working fine. We recentl upgraded the
HD, added memory and new video card. Has been working fine since
Christmas. His system locked up while playing a game yesterday, he went
to reboot and got nothing but a black screen with cursor blinking. He's
running XP Home with NTFS partioned drive (one 250GB with one partiion).

Now here's the kicker - I put his drive into two other Dells (2350 and
4600 - we all have Dell's) and the sucker boots fine.

Next kicker - I put his original HD (one that we copied to the 250GB
when we upgraded his system) in the 8250 and it boots fine.

250GB is any other system boots fine, only fails to boot in the 8250,
but the 8250 boots fine with it's original HD. I'm at my wits end on
this one.

With about 6 hours into trying to get this fixed, here's what I've tried
so far:

1 - Went into SAFE mode, as soon as it starts to boot black screen with
blinking cursor again.
2 - Created XP boot disk (floppy). Booted system from this floppy, it
starts booting but then gives an error that HAL.DLL is missing or
corrupt. Tried to boot in SAFE mode, same problem.
3 - Pulled 250GB drive from 8250 and put into Dell 2350. System boots
fine. On chance that HAL.DLL is corrupt for particular hardware I copied
HAL.DLL from original drive. Still boots fine in 2350 but boots to black
screen with blinking cursor in 8250.
4 - Used Windows Recovery Console to try repair of boot on drive.
Rebuilt BOOT.INI. Same black screen with blinking cursor on reboot.
5 - Used Windows Recovery Console to try repair of boot record and MBR.
Utilities ran fine, but system still boots to black screen with blinking
cursor.
6 -At this time I wanted to verify that nothing I've done has corrupted
the HD from booting, put it back into 2350 and still boots fine - ARGH!
7 - Ran Windows set-up using REPAIR option. System went and reinstalled
all the Window files, when system boots up black screen with blinking
cursor (but yes, this still boots fine in 2350) - ARGHHHH!!!!!!

I've run out of ideas. Can't figure out why this boots fine in every
other system I've tested but won't boot in it's own PC. I've started
down the path to rebuild the HD. Anyone have any ideas on what would
cause the drive to fail to boot in only one system?

My next steps (unless someone has suggestions to get this sucker to boot
correctly) will be to rebuild the drive again, but I'd really rather fix
whatever has gone wrong so I don't have to spend the time reinstalling
all the recent programs, utilities and drivers.

First double check the cable or replace it, and set it to CS (cable
select)
and try to boot again. If no luck then boot to repair console and type
fixmbr [enter] then fixboot [enter] and reboot. If still no luck then
you have a BIOS issue.

Bob wrote:
>
> My son's PC (Dell 8250) has been working fine. We recentl upgraded the
> HD, added memory and new video card. Has been working fine since
> Christmas. His system locked up while playing a game yesterday, he went
> to reboot and got nothing but a black screen with cursor blinking. He's
> running XP Home with NTFS partioned drive (one 250GB with one partiion).
>
> Now here's the kicker - I put his drive into two other Dells (2350 and
> 4600 - we all have Dell's) and the sucker boots fine.
>
> Next kicker - I put his original HD (one that we copied to the 250GB
> when we upgraded his system) in the 8250 and it boots fine.
>
> 250GB is any other system boots fine, only fails to boot in the 8250,
> but the 8250 boots fine with it's original HD. I'm at my wits end on
> this one.
>
> With about 6 hours into trying to get this fixed, here's what I've tried
> so far:
>
> 1 - Went into SAFE mode, as soon as it starts to boot black screen with
> blinking cursor again.
> 2 - Created XP boot disk (floppy). Booted system from this floppy, it
> starts booting but then gives an error that HAL.DLL is missing or
> corrupt. Tried to boot in SAFE mode, same problem.
> 3 - Pulled 250GB drive from 8250 and put into Dell 2350. System boots
> fine. On chance that HAL.DLL is corrupt for particular hardware I copied
> HAL.DLL from original drive. Still boots fine in 2350 but boots to black
> screen with blinking cursor in 8250.
> 4 - Used Windows Recovery Console to try repair of boot on drive.
> Rebuilt BOOT.INI. Same black screen with blinking cursor on reboot.
> 5 - Used Windows Recovery Console to try repair of boot record and MBR.
> Utilities ran fine, but system still boots to black screen with blinking
> cursor.
> 6 -At this time I wanted to verify that nothing I've done has corrupted
> the HD from booting, put it back into 2350 and still boots fine - ARGH!
> 7 - Ran Windows set-up using REPAIR option. System went and reinstalled
> all the Window files, when system boots up black screen with blinking
> cursor (but yes, this still boots fine in 2350) - ARGHHHH!!!!!!
>
> I've run out of ideas. Can't figure out why this boots fine in every
> other system I've tested but won't boot in it's own PC. I've started
> down the path to rebuild the HD. Anyone have any ideas on what would
> cause the drive to fail to boot in only one system?
>
> My next steps (unless someone has suggestions to get this sucker to boot
> correctly) will be to rebuild the drive again, but I'd really rather fix
> whatever has gone wrong so I don't have to spend the time reinstalling
> all the recent programs, utilities and drivers.

Since the system was working fine until a game was installed have you
thought of un-installing the game that locked the computer up to see
what happens ??

Since the system was working fine until a game was installed have you
thought of un-installing the game that locked the computer up to see
what happens ??