HP Pavilion wont boot, see _ mark

[cyclones]

Hello,

I am fixing my friends HP Pavilion computer and I recently fixed it by reformating it and reinstalling windows xp home about a month ago. She told me that her daughter was downloading songs and such one day and then they shut the computer off for a couple of days and then turned it back on. It will go through the boot screen telling me if I want to press F12 or Del for setup options. It goes to the next screen where it sits with the _ mark blinking and that's all it does. It keeps blinking and that's how far it boots up and wont go any further.

Any suggestions on what's wrong with it?

Thanks.

 

[KSoD]

Hello,

It could be anything. Could be hardware failure. Could be a trojan or a virus from teh songs being downloaded. Could just be that it didnt shut down right.

So you will have to see if you can get into Safe Mode to try and run some scans. If not maybe a Restore Point.

If none of that works you might be reinstalling Windows for them again.

Cheers,
Mak

 

[EricB]

reinstall windows. do a system recovery if you hadn't deleted that partition