Blinking white line

[Meresgi]

Girlfriends computer just shot off this morning. When I put it up its just a flashing white line in the top left corner. I took the battery out of the mobo and reset the bios, it then lets me log into the bios and tells me to reboot the system. It seems to recognize the HDD is there, but when I reboot it goes back to the flashing line. I'm at a total loss right now, i'm pretty sure its her HDD or maybe just a corrupt windows installation and I need to reinstall?

Anyone have any idea?


Edit: Also, the boot priority had removable disk as 1, HDD as 2 after resetting the bios. I changed the HDD to 1 and upon reboot the flashing line happens. I'm going to guess its a corrupt OS?

Edit 2: Also I don't get a bios startup before the flashing cursor line, I have to reset the mobo to even get into the bios it seems.

[Norellicus]

You can get into the BIOS every time the system boots, you just may not be seeing the screen to do so. As soon as you hit the power button start smashing the button that gets you to bios and you should get in, most monitors don't turn on fast enough to see it (especially these days with the "fast boot" option that skips some of the tertiary self checks).

That said, yeah it sounds like a botched OS. The physical drive is likely fine as it's not giving you a "non system disk" error, but it can't hit the bootloader to proceed onward.

[Meresgi]

Fresh WinXP install seemed to do the trick, I guess her OS got corrupted some time between last night and this morning *Shrug*