XP Black Screen

D

Dinomartin294

I found an old XP machine by Time Computers in our attic and I cleaned it up and decided to see if it booted. It did and it went to a black screen with the cursor on it, for two hours it didn't do anything it just stayed on the black screen. I rebooted into safe mode and it did the same thing. Bear in mind this PC is really old and no longer has a disk drive because it was removed long ago. And we do not have a Windows XP disk at all. I really wanted to see if I could either recover data or jus restore it to use. Any help is appreciated. :). Thanks.
 
you can also plug in a working monitor to see if the original monitor is broken, seeing a black screen on the new monitor will mean an internal problem and not the monitor.
 
Elizabeth23 said:
you can also plug in a working monitor to see if the original monitor is broken, seeing a black screen on the new monitor will mean an internal problem and not the monitor.
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Thanks for the reply, however the monitor I have is brand new as I already have a desktop PC and there IS a hard drive in the computer there is no CD drive in it. Also, there is an operating system to boot to.
 
http://ccm.net/forum/affich-743275-black-screen-only-cursor

read through the thread above

can you boot to the bios??

http://www.pcworld.com/article/241032/how_to_enter_your_pcs_bios.html

above article shows several ways to enter bios if you do not know or cannot see on boot the screen that shows which key to click on your pc.

cannot find Time Computers listing not even in the out of business lists

List of computer manufacturers

if you can get into bios see if it has the boot listed as hdd first

let me know what happens and any messages verbatim please.
 
@OP: There are several issues one must consider with old machines that have been in storage for a long time:

1. Data on magnetic drives (ie. the hard drive) lose their magnetism over time. It's possible the data on the drive lost their magnetism and got corrupted. A simple reinstall/reformat will re-magnetize the drive.

2. There is a small round lithium battery on the motherboard (logic board) that powers the clock and/or BIOS. It's possible the battery is dead, leading to boot up errors. The way to solve the problem is to remove and/or reinsert the battery.

3. The BIOS firmware got "corrupted" from lack of use. Most computers boot to a black screen b/c of issues with the BIOS. The way to reset the BIOS is to remove the CMOS (clock) lithium battery in #2 AND to re-seat the RAM memory modules (basically removing them for 1-5 minutes and then re-inserting them into the motherboard (logic board). For further help on this, consult the system board manual that came with the computer...

Btw, the last time I solved a computer that booted to a black screen was to swap the RAM memory modules around. Try various combinations of where each RAM module goes on the motherboard...
 
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eatup said:
There is a small round lithium battery on the motherboard (logic board) that powers the clock and/or BIOS. It's possible the battery is dead, leading to boot up errors. The way to solve the problem is to remove and/or reinsert the battery.
Click to expand...

This is the most common cause of problems that I've come across. A mate of mine, who cheerfully calls himself a 'tech dinosaur', bought himself a Dell Inspiron 530s with Vista in late 2007. Last year, he called me into have a look at it. 'What's up?' I asked him. 'I have to reset the clock every time I power-up', was his reply. 'Can't do a thing till it's the right time again.'

Dead give-away, right there. Five minutes later, after replacing the CMOS battery with a new CR2032, everything was hunky-dory again. It's a very common occurrence with older hardware.....and as eatup says, that's just one of many problems a flat battery will cause. I'm not too sure about the drive de-magnetising; I would have thought you'd be looking at maybe 25-30 years storage before that could occur, but hey.....what do I know? :p

Another link here:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Computers


Mike. ;)
 
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Mike_Walsh said:
This is the most common cause of problems that I've come across. A mate of mine, who cheerfully calls himself a 'tech dinosaur', bought himself a Dell Inspiron 530s with Vista in late 2007. Last year, he called me into have a look at it. 'What's up?' I asked him. 'I have to reset the clock every time I power-up', was his reply. 'Can't do a thing till it's the right time again.'

Dead give-away, right there. Five minutes later, after replacing the CMOS battery with a new CR2032, everything was hunky-dory again. It's a very common occurrence with older hardware.....and as eatup says, that's just one of many problems a flat battery will cause. I'm not too sure about the drive de-magnetising; I would have thought you'd be looking at maybe 25-30 years storage before that could occur, but hey.....what do I know? :p

Another link here:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Computers


Mike. ;)
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The conventional wisdom is that you should revisit your data every five years to make sure that you can still read it. The general consensus is that the magnetic platters in the drive will start to degrade in 5 years of storage.
 
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