I am assuming you don't need any data on the hard drive and the BIOS 
detected the hard drive? At this point in your testing, I would 
disconnect all drives (hard, optical, and so on) from the motherboard 
(MB) and then boot again. If there is a network card or built in network 
you might see the computer trying to boot from the network by a screen 
message (and maybe not). During this booting process, you should read 
the error No system found or something to those words on the screen. If 
I got the No System error message I would then plug in Just the hard 
drive back to the MB. Boot again and see what happens? If the underline 
cursor is there again, I would remove the hard drive and test the drive 
in a known working system by temporally installing it into that system 
as a second drive. Testing the drive I would check it for S.M.A.R.T. 
protocols using any one of the free reporting software's. From the 
report you can decided if the drive needs replacing or just reformatted 
with the OS installed again. Don't forget, do you need any data off the 
drive before you format/install OS. If the drive is bad, is it covered 
by warranty? New drives have the date on them and you can check the 
warranty on the makers website. Remember too that drive are cheap and if 
you are sure the drive is bad or weak, replace it. You may get it to 
work again but if the drive is old or the drive status report is weak so 
you don't really want to spend time with the drive because if will most 
likely fail again in a short time. I hope it goes will for you.

On 5/29/2010 5:41 AM, Michael Eisenstadt wrote:
> I am trying to troubleshoot the following: 500Watt Coolmaster PSU, Gigabyte GA-MA790GPT mb, 2G DDR3 RAM, AMD Phenom II X3, Samsung SATA 80G hd, running Win XP Pro. The BIOS is accessible. reboots with normal single ping, but screen is blank except for blinking underline cursor on upper left and small image of the letter N. Monitor and onboard video are normal when displaying the BIOS.
>
> ....
>    

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