will not boot

I have a Dell with Win98SE that when you attempt to start it, it will display the dell screen and then go directly to a black screen with a small flashing white bar (looks like a cursor, but is not) in the upper left corner. No other info is displayed about errors, missing files, etc. I have tied to hold ctrl during start up, and also tapped f8 to try and enter safe mode during start up, but it will not go to safe mode. You can get to bios info by hitting f2 during start up. I opened the case and made sure all components were properly plugged in and seated, and everything appears OK. I also tried a win 98 start up boot disk, and it will not boot from that either. The light will flash on the floppy drive and you can hear the unit tring to work but then nothing happens.
Any suggestions?
Thanks much, Tom

 

Hi Tom
If you can get into your bios, were you able to see if you've got your computer set to boot from the floppy? Any possibility that you let go of the F8 key too soon, while trying to boot to safe mode? Did you make certain you have a working boot disk?

Daizy

 

Hi Daizy:
Yes, I went into the BIOS and set the boot sequence to A drive only, and still it will not do anything. As before, you can hear the A drive trying to work, but it then goes silent and nothing happens. I also took my boot disk to another computer and it boots from the disk OK. It seems that this might be BIOS related, the pc is not getting any boot instructions.
Any suggestions are appreciated!
Tom

 

One other thing I forgot to mention, I tried numerous times to get to safe mode, both by using the F8 key, and also tried holding the Ctrl key during start up, neither would take me to safe mode.
Thanks, Tom