How to Fix Flashing Cursor on Startup

If you find yourself stuck with a flashing cursor and no Windows start up disk, you are not alone. Many retail outlets don't provide disks and instead leave it up to customers to create boot discs or rely on Windows Recovery to get them out of a jam. What if you can't get into Windows Recovery and you are stuck without the discs?

Your data is on the hard drive you just can't get the operating system to boot. You may get a flashing cursor or other message on a black screen. This is actually a good sign. It means that your hard drive still works! You don't want to see a blue screen of death which could indicate a problem with the drive itself. It could also just mean that a cable is unplugged.

The hard drive starts at sector (0,0) and looks for an operating system. If it doesn't find one it will likely give you the black screen you are looking at.

It is possible that you deleted or have a damaged partition that has the job of booting the operating system. Many laptops have a separate partition that serves this function. If it was deleted, you may be able to recover from this situation.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• USB flash drive
• Or CD/DVD burner

1. Don't panic. Your data is likely still intact on the hard drive. Hard drives are actually extremely stable and rarely will you see total loss of data.

2. Check out pendrivelinux.com. It gives complete details on how to download and extract ubuntu onto a flash drive and make it bootable. You can have a portable operating system on a 2 GB flash drive and boot it onto your computer. (assuming your computer can boot from a flash drive)

3. This is the quickest way to get to your data. Your drive will appear as a media drive and you can access your data and back it up to CD/DVD or an external hard drive. That should get you started.

4. There is also a great tool called BartPE and the Ultimate Boot Disk that use this tool to boot up into a shell of XP. You need an operating system disc to load the tool so you are kind of stuck until you get an operating system disk. Another option is to create a bootable flash drive with dos on it. Install the handy program testdisk onto the drive and use the tool to restore your disk structure pre-crash. Be sure to read the wiki for this powerful tool. You don't want to create more problems before you fix the original issue.

Resources

• Install Ubuntu to Flash Drive