Blinking Cursor On Startup ???

[jackass]

hi was wondering if anybody could point me in the right direction plz regarding small problem im occasionally having on startup .sometimes my pc boots up fine, but more often than not i get a black screen with a white blinking cursor in the top left hand corner , and does nothing until i press reset, when it starts to reboot it usually then starts ok but sometimes it takes 2 or 3 goes , havent changed anything hardware or configuration wise lately it just started doing it one day last week (motherboard on the way out perhaps ??)
thx for and help/replies ,cheers #
p4 512mb ram win xp pro sp2

[Nox]

See that at work a lot, well relatively.

Nox

[obvious]

Maybe your power supply is on the way out. Is there an option to have a delay when spinning up the hard disks in the BIOS?

Also I'd check your RAM with memtest86.

It's not clear whether it's either of these but definately worth troubleshooting.

[Dav0s]

hi was wondering if anybody could point me in the right direction plz regarding small problem im occasionally having on startup .sometimes my pc boots up fine, but more often than not i get a black screen with a white blinking cursor in the top left hand corner , and does nothing until i press reset, when it starts to reboot it usually then starts ok but sometimes it takes 2 or 3 goes , havent changed anything hardware or configuration wise lately it just started doing it one day last week (motherboard on the way out perhaps ??)
thx for and help/replies ,cheers #
p4 512mb ram win xp pro sp2

at what point does this happen?

you are overclocked?

can you type anything? (like DOS)

[TheAnimus]

are you on the latest BIOS for your motherboard?

[scottxxx]

My Dad's PC has a similar problem. It never comes on the first time, but usually comes on after restarting, although nothing appears on the screen, its just blank. I tried putting my FX5200 in it instead of on-board graphics and it worked fine, so thought the on-board graphics were broken, so bought a cheap radeon 9250 instead. This didn't help at all, so the only other thing I can think of is the PSU - maybe the other components are demanding too much power on boot up, or run MemTest to check if the RAM is dodgy.

[jackass]

i have just been into the bios as someone suggested and in the power up control section the boot order was floppy,cdrom,hd
so i changed it to hd,cdrom,floppy and it booted straight away however i have yet to try it again
it doesnt even get to the windows logo and no i cant type anything

[jackass]

no its still occasionally doing it but less frequently ???