X20 won't boot from HD - I'm stumped

[Voodle]

This just started today and I'm not sure of how to fix it.
Earlier today, I left the laptop running from the battery and I guess I left it for too long (there was about an hour of capacity left, I thought I had XP set to hibernate at 3%). When I got back to it, it had turned off and just had the standby light on - when I tried to turn it back on (before I replaced the battery and tried again), all I could get was a flashing underscore in the top left (I keep wanting to call it a cursor). So I shut it off and put another battery with a full charge in it and again, all it showed was a blinking underscore.

Then I tried running it from the mains - same
Then I removed the bios battery - same
Then I removed the memory - same
then the netword card - same

I can get it to boot from a floppy disk or CD, but not the HD, I tried fixing the bootsector and MBR from XP's repair console. I've tried replacing the HD with one from another laptop with a similar design and it did the blinking cursor thing too. This showed me that it's not a fault with HD because it should have at least got to XP's boot screen and crashed there, but it still got stuck on the underscore.

I've downloaded and run the PC doctor diagnostic, and ran a full diagnostic which it passed, after about an hour of checking the HD.

At this point, I've put the flat battery back in to reproduce what I think were the conditions it went into standby under and got it to shut down in the same way - and then plugged it back in to charge. I'm hoping it got confused about whether it had gone into standby or hibernated or shut down.
One thing to note is that when I booted the machine up to use it, I had a USB flash drive in the USB port, and it hung at the IBM screen for a bit until I removed the flash drive, this drive has also just failed, but the USB diagnostics passed in PC Doctor diagnostics so I doubt it's that

I know it's not the HD or the IDE controller because I can still boot off the XP cd and see the partitions from inside the repair console, and write to them.


Has anyone seen a similar problem to this? There doesn't seem to be anything physically wrong with any of the components but it still won't boot. I hope this rambling isn't too illegible as well

[selvan777]

What have you tried while faced with the blinking underscore prior to turning off?

This may be silly but there's no dumb question....right?

What I mean is like did you try pushing the enter key or esc key or ctrl-alt-del combo? In other words I think your bios was waiting your input.

[egibbs]

Can you get into BIOS?

If so try reloading the factory defaults for the BIOS settings - maybe the HDD info got clobbered. Check you boot order and options too - make sure the HDD is in the sequence.

Ed Gibbs

[Voodle]

I seem to have got it working, but I did so many things without checking that I don't know what did anything.

I've dismantled it and left it for an hour or so with the bios battery disconnected, formatted the hard disk completely (I think installing linux and then giving up on it messed up the MBR despite my attempts to fix it) and now I'm reinstalling windows. And now it boots.

I'm not too happy that I had to reinstall windows on it again but it happens fairly often with this laptop so nothing was lost.