Hello,

I am wondering if anyone can help me with this somewhat bizare issue.

I have a laptop that experiences black screen with blinking cursor on
boot. When I removed the harddrive I ran diagnostics and the harddrive
itself was fine. I checked for viruses with NOD32 and there were
none.

I tried a number of things (fixing the mbr, boot sector, etc) and the
problem remained unresolved until I noticed that "ntdetect.com"
filename was in lowercase unlike on my own computer, I overwrote
"ntldr" and "ntdetect.com" with copies from my own computer,
reinserted the drive and it booted just fine.

Now here's the catch: I had made a copy of the files before
overwriting them, I later compared them with the versions from my
computer and they are identical.

The following day the user brought the laptop back as the same problem
had reoccured. I overwrote the "ntldr" and "NTDETECT.COM" files again
and again the laptop now booted just fine.

Does anyone have any ideas on what might cause such behaviour? I'm
somewhat at a loss.

Thanks.

"DustWolf" <jure.sah@bia.si> wrote in message
news:dafb49b6-c088-42e7-a1af-019e01881de7@r24g2000yqd.googlegroups.com...
> Hello,
>
> I am wondering if anyone can help me with this somewhat bizare issue.
>
> I have a laptop that experiences black screen with blinking cursor on
> boot. When I removed the harddrive I ran diagnostics and the harddrive
> itself was fine. I checked for viruses with NOD32 and there were
> none.
>
> I tried a number of things (fixing the mbr, boot sector, etc) and the
> problem remained unresolved until I noticed that "ntdetect.com"
> filename was in lowercase unlike on my own computer, I overwrote
> "ntldr" and "ntdetect.com" with copies from my own computer,
> reinserted the drive and it booted just fine.
>
> Now here's the catch: I had made a copy of the files before
> overwriting them, I later compared them with the versions from my
> computer and they are identical.
>
> The following day the user brought the laptop back as the same problem
> had reoccured. I overwrote the "ntldr" and "NTDETECT.COM" files again
> and again the laptop now booted just fine.
>
> Does anyone have any ideas on what might cause such behaviour? I'm
> somewhat at a loss.
>
> Thanks.

Windows does not care about upper/lower case file names. I suspect that this
is an issue related to the hard disk in that it may be marginal when it is
cold. Once it is warmed up, it is fine. Note also that the black screen with
a flashing cursor in the top left-hand corner is usually a sign of the
primary partition not being marked "active". You can check this in
diskmgmt.msc.

Hi,

The partition is (and was) marked okay (was the first thing I
checked). I thought the lowercase issue indicated the file may have
been modified.

It seems strange to me that this would be a disk error, since the disk
itself never logged any errors (not even a communication CRC error)
and the booting always started working when overwriting those two
files and not before (when it had ample opportunity to warm up).

Thanks anyway.

LP,
Jure

On 3 nov., 16:58, "Pegasus [MVP]" <n...@microsoft.com> wrote:
> Windows does not care about upper/lower case file names. I suspect that this
> is an issue related to the hard disk in that it may be marginal when it is
> cold. Once it is warmed up, it is fine. Note also that the black screen with
> a flashing cursor in the top left-hand corner is usually a sign of the
> primary partition not being marked "active". You can check this in
> diskmgmt.msc.