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. > > .... > The NOSPIN Group Promotions is now offering our special coffee mugs and mouse pads with the PCBUILD logo... at a great price!!! http://freepctech.com/goodies/promotions.shtml