Long Blinking Cursor on boot..

I've searched through many threads on the internet about this problem and have tried many things to correct it, but nothing seems to work. heres the story:

When i boot up, post goes through normally..but right after post is done, the screen blinks and loads a black screen and a false blinking cursor on the top left. This lasts for about 20 to 30 seconds, than windows load screen goes through normally than windows loads. It seems that its searching for something, i dont know..theres no HDD activity during this time. RAID and all of that stuff is off. Without that cursor, my start ups would be much faster.

Now i've read many fixes for this problem and have tried all of them, messing around bios (i think ive tried every single options there ie, usb controllers, HDD settings, LAN settings, Boot settings). I've also formatted windows twice. The funny thing about that is the first time i loaded windows when i built my system..this problem was there from the start..about 3 weeks ago i reformated windows and the problem disappeared..i didnt really do anyhting different that i remember. Now i had to reformat again about a week ago and the problem came back. Thats when i tried to reinstall drivers and mess with the bios settings..but nothing..than today i reinstalled windows again but this time did not install the IDE SE nvidia drivers ( i heard they cause this problem) but still same thing. Please if anyone can give me anymore insight..id really be greatful. Thanks

System specs:
Windows XP Pro SP 2
A8N32-SLI Deluxe
7950GT 512MB PCI-e
1 SATA 200 gig (main disk)
1 PATA 70 gig
1 dvd/cd-rw combo drive
All the lastest drivers expect no IDE SE Nvidia drivers (use windows default ones)

 

I might see it as a HDD boot sector problem

Check the harddrive with the HDD manufacturer's utilities. If the utilities have the ability to "back up" the MBR, do so, then look at "updating" the MBR. If you don't have any data to lose, look at doing a "zero fill" (low level format) on the drive. If you find that a Dynamic Drive Overlay has been installed on the drive, remove it.

After you install Windows, reboot (actually, restart/cold boot) the computer and see if the problem is still occuring before you install any drivers or software. Install the drivers and do some restarts again. Antivirus software may want to "innoculate" the boot sector of the HDD, watch for this.

My other thought would be that the BIOS is having trouble with a piece of hardware. Do some searches for DMI.

Matt

 

Alright, I'll scan the harddrive..but I doubt that's it, cause just one format ago this problem didnt exist, and nothing major happened to the HDD.

Also, what do you mean by searching DMI?

Thanks

 

The blinking cursor is the stage where the BIOS is looking for the boot files of the operating system. Since you have reinstalled Windows and it does boot eventually, I think there is a problem with reading the information off the HDD. The first thing I would do is test the drive. I have seen problems where a drive was formatted as 65,001 sectors as opposed to 65,000. Windows worked, but there were strange holdups during boot. The utilities can tell you many things about the drive and it's communication with the rest of the system.

Unless you can remember what you might have done differently, I would look at the way the drive is formatted and partitioned. If I find any problems using Windows format, I use the HDD manufacturer's utilities to partition and format the drive, they know the exact specifications of the drive.

It works after one format, it does not work after another, I would believe there was a small bug in a code somewhere and my guess would be the boot sector. The boot sector holds all the partitioning, formatting/file system information. You could try running Error Checking (chkdsk, look in Help and Support), but me, I would start by checking the HDD. If you have more than one drive (the C: drive) on the HDD the problem could be with the partitioning/formatting of the other drive/s.

Sorry, the "searches for DMI" was a little cryptic .
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dmi+pool+cursor&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
You may want to add the word delay and when you have time see if there are any similar problems to your's.

 

mattman,
thanks for the advice..i'll try to run those checks as soon as i am able and let you know what comes out of it.

Christer, no i dont think that applies here, i have 2 drives, the main with only one partition, the 2nd with 2 partitions that i use for storage..do i dont think i have anything powering off..thanks for the suggestion though