Black Screen With Blinking Cursor.

I am using Windows Vista 64bit on a self assembled PC since a year now and it was working without any problem. I’m also having attached an external Hard Drive with the same since the first day I installed Vista on it. Now there is a problem started 4 days ago. Whenever I boot my system it gets stuck at Black Screen with blinking cursor. It remains there for about 10 minutes (if you leave it ideal) and restarts again. And if I hit F12 to select the boot device and select Hard Drive, it boots fine.

The problem actually started when I ran a Virus Checker 4 days ago and check windows updates. I only check for updates but dint installed any of them. And next time when I booted it for the first time, it came up with installing update 3 of 3 and then stuck with the blinking cursor. And as I said, it not remains there for hours if we don’t do anything.

I don’t have any idea what to do. Any fix of the same ? Thanks in advance.

Not sure but highly suspect that the problem is with your external Hard drive that is connected with the system. No matter it is connected from a year and problem started now, but when we boot a system it searches for the primary boot device and if founds more than 1 device BIOS gets confused which to select and boot. Hence I’ll suggest you to disconnect the external HDD and try booting it once. See if you still see the blinking cursor with black screen. I don’t think it will appear.

Alternatively, restart the computer and enter the BIOS, select your system Hard disk and set it as primary boot device. See if still you get the same problem.

You should try scanning your system completely with updated malwarebytes. I suspect some malware could be the reason for the same.

For more help on similar problem, you can check the following articles:
http://forums.techarena.in/windows-v...ce/1456099.htm
http://forums.techarena.in/windows-software/1430652.htm
http://forums.techarena.in/hardware-...ls/1439330.htm