Black screen, Flashing white line

[dfigravity]

It's an old Compaq...all the motherboard says is UWAVE2...when you turn the PC on, the red Compaq logo comes up for a few seconds, and then it goes to a black screen with a little flashing white line in the upper left hand corner. WTF. :mad:

[slytherock]

look like no OS... next question...

[dfigravity]

that's the crazy thing though...I have tried two seperate HD's both with fresh XP installs on them.......:think:

[slytherock]

take a look into your bios for disk priority

[Xperiment]

I had the same problem a little while back. Turns out somehow my bios had switched my external hard disk to 1st priority ?!?!

As slytherock said, check your boot sequence and disk priority.

[dfigravity]

I went in and checked my BIOS settings and sure enough, it had my CD-ROM as first boot priority. So I set hard disk as primary boot, saved changes and exit. Same thing happens. I went back in just to make sure that it had saved and it did...still had HD as primary boot...but it goes to that black screen with flashing line almost immediatley on startup.

edit:
I swapped the HD out with one that I know for a fact works and it made it past the plack screen with the falshing line in the corner, but now it is a black screen with a white progress bar across the bottom. It went al the way to the right side of the screen, and now it's just sitting there with a solid white bar.

[doug91]

Try a fresh re-install of an OS. If you have one, put a boot disk into the computer and see what happens.

[HackSore]

Try a fresh re-install of an OS. If you have one, put a boot disk into the computer and see what happens.

Yeah, that should sort the problem out.

[dfigravity]

cool...I am going to give that a try tomorrow...given the time. Work has been a bit*h lately. I appreciate all of the input!!

[organicpuzzle]

It's never a good idea to install an OS on a drive on one computer then transfer it to a different one. From what you said, this is what I understand you did. If you did there could be a number of problems, the simplest being that the drivers are incompatible.

[grizzlyironbear]

if you check the microsoft website for OS help, they HIGHLY reccomend that any time you do any major changes to your computer's hard drive, that you do a fresh install of windows. this ensures that your copy of windows will indeed, work. since each computer's specs are as different as human beings, it makes sense that it wouldnt fire up. also, remember that when you install a new part on windows, it takes a while to install the necessary drivers for that individual part. and since you posted that you took a HDD out of some other comp and jammed it into the one in question, my best guess is that it locked up the OS with driver file installations. bottom line, reinstall windows FRESH on the comp with the prob.

[dfigravity]

well it looks like the HD was bad...I grabbed another one (same type) and it worked just fine. Thanks for all the input guys!