I would think hardware 1st,

If you feel comfortable open the case and one at a time
remove and reseat the hard drive cables. Then do same for
the power cables. If fact I would do same for all cables and
cards. One at a time REMOVE and RESEAT. Don't just
try to push in/on.

"Jinxxed0" <guest@unknown-email.com> wrote in message
news:e8dd8393b9b8168cb94c423c3f95aa90@nntp-gateway.com...[color=blue]
>
> Hello, I came accross your forum and decided to give it a try since I
> saw the helpful people posting in other threads. I've asked this
> question in many other forums but no one seems to know whats wrong.
>
> For a few days now my PC would start and get to a black screen with a
> blinking "_" in the upper left corner. I would turn it off then turn it
> on again and it would work. I figured I'd just clean the dust out of it
> and do a factory restore later on (which I did).
>
> But since yesterday, I've had to do 4 or 5 restores to set it to
> factory condition. It gets to the point where I get to that screen and I
> wait 5 or 10 minutes, then the screens says "fail to boot disk, please
> insert disk" or something. so I place in the disk that my PC promted to
> make when i first got it (for restoring and repairing it and such) and
> then everything works again. but eventually with all the automatic
> updates i have to restart of course, and it starts up again fine, but
> after about 2 or 3 restarts it fails again.
>
> Do I have a corrupted OS or something? I've reset my PC to factory
> condition twice before its had this problem. And its never given me
> trouble. A little info that may or may not be important is that its an
> HP computer, I've it for about a year and a half, and I play a lot of PC
> games.
>
> Also, when it fails or is going to boot, pressing F8 does nothing. But
> after a factory reset, it seems to work fine and I can start windows
> normally.
>
> thanks in advance for the help.
>
>
> --
> Jinxxed0[/color]