Why do I get a black screen with a blinking cursor when I boot?

Answer by  Stenu (43)

There are several different cases when this kind of behavior occurs. Usually this is because of malfunction of your video display card. It might also be that you do have a disk in your floppy drive and your computer tries to boot from there. You could also check that your bios battery is not dead.

Answer by  xturker (7)

You might not have an operating system installed on your computer's boot drive. Try booting from a different drive (a secondary hard disk, or even a usb flash drive with an operating system on it), if this doesn't work, try installing an OS like Microsoft Windows or Linux on your computer.

Answer by  Rainman (14)

If all you get is a blinking cursor during boot up it most likely means your computer has stopped before loading the operating system. This could be caused by a change in hardware, such as a video card or memory or by a problem with the operation system or a incorrectly configured BIOS.

Answer by  davidsmith4deltaedu (338)

It sounds like the computer does not know what to boot to. If this just started happening, there is a chance the hard drive died. You can go into the bios and load the defaults. On boot before the cursur, usually will tell you how to access the bios.

Answer by  rhg2k3 (8)

.its something to do with the master boot record.I boot from that drive I get a black screeen..I boot from the primary i get black screen with a blinking cursor.