Latitude D800 Blinking Cursor, stopped recognizing hard drive correctly

Using a drive larger than that supported by the system can produce unpredictable results -  since this model has no suppot for drives over 120G, for the sake of reliability, replace it with a 120G drive.

Actually, I've now had that same problem 4 times since last summer, with a 60G, 120G, and a 160G.  Currently I'm also looking again to see if there is a solution.  I have an Inspiron 9200 though..  And I've tried diagnosing with UBCD4WIN, various live Linux CD's..  All that works just fine, the data is there, I can copy, write, read, everything but boot.  Last time I tried repairing the MBR, the FAT, replacing NTLDR and anything I could think of.  I even did an repair install of XP over XP and then tried installing a 2nd XP in a different directory..  Nothing fixed it..  I don't have another 9200 to try this drive in, but this time I will just put it in another machine, maybe a 9300 and see what happens..  I'm not holding my breath though..

It seems to happen as I recall, after doing an MS update and needing to reboot..  It just doesn't.  It comes on, does the self test, and then I get a black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner..  And probably coincidently this time, I also now have a vertical line of dead pixels in the display.  This line is not visible when using an external monitor, so perhaps the display is failing as well..  Hmmm....

It would help to know if this is hardware or software related as well, but I'm thinking software because it has happened to me with 3 different drives now and it performs flawlessly (more or less) in between these non-booting spells...

Any ideas anyone??

Thanks,

Roy

It seems like Dell has no interest in resolving this issue. We've experienced the boot freeze at the blinking cursor on two Dell Latitudes (D810) used for our business. This is a tough one to troubleshoot because Dell doesn't put enough information about how it installs the OS. For example, Dell puts a small partition on the hard drive with the larger Windows XP partition but provides no information about this. Is this a boot loader? What does this mean with regards to the MBR? When I boot the non-booting Latitude from my PartitionMagic 8 CD, it shows an "Error #108", which seems to imply that the MBR's magic number is incorrect, but when I checked the functional Latitude the same error is displayed.

Attempting to repair the OS fails, implying that there is something wrong with a vector in the MBR, but since Dell provides no tools for verifying the MBR I can see no means to determine if that's a valid conclusion. However, they do provide a nice suite of tests when you press F12 during the POST process, which our systems pass. I am currently trying to fix the boot problem by reinstalling Windows XP from the XP discs provided by Dell with our laptops. If that does not work, then my only option appears to be to reinstall the Latitude's original small HD and then transfer its contents to the larger currently unbootable HD and then reinstall my backed up data. This is accomplished by the DataTransfer kit by CMS and sold by Dell. This kit allows you to transfer your current system to another, more than likely a larger, HD and does work very well.

My question is, where is Dell? Is it the customer's responsibility to work the support desk? Doesn't Dell have any integrity and concern for it's products and their designs? Dell really needs to provide a better support solution for its customers. Forcing us to resolve Dell's design problems is no solution, as the dates of these posts and multiple threads show.