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XPS 8300, won't boot, shows underscore
My XPS 8300/SSD boot/2 SATA drives/Win 10 will no longer load windows. At POST I get the Dell logo, the bar across the bottom of the screen, and the options to enter F2 or F12.After that, just the black screen with the underscore flashing in the upper left corner.
I've done the following:
- Reseated everything - memory, drives, graphics card
- Checked the power supply - fan runs fine
- The fans for the CPU and on the rear panel work fine
- Run all diagnostics under F12, everything passes regular and detailed scans
- Removed the battery, cleared the power per instructions found here, no change
- Tried to run the computer from the DVD drive, no change
I can't think of anything else to do. I've noticed more than one thread here about failing 8300 motherboards. Is that the likely possibility? How do I tell?
This is my last gasp trying to fix this, otherwise I'm going to have to get a new one, which I really can't afford. Any suggestions?
Thanks,
ejbSF
JOcean
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November 10th, 2018 10:00
Go to the following page and follow the steps. If you ran diagnostics and everything checked out then the motherboard is probably fine. It sounds more like a hard drive (in your case SSD) or the boot order in the BIOS. If you tap F2 and enter the BIOS what is listed as the first boot device? It should be the boot drive or might be Windows Boot Manager.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/327145-28-black-screen-blinking-cursor-left-help
ejbSF
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November 11th, 2018 13:00
Thank you for your reply, JOcean. You didn't exactly solve it, but you pointed me in the right direction and HOORAY for that!
It wasn't the motherboard or the boot order, but it was the SSD boot drive. But the SSD didn't crash and lose its files, rather somehow, with all the meddling to upgrade my monitor and graphics card (which never worked) the SSD and Windows somehow lost track of each other. I dug out my Windows restore Flash drive (created it a hear ago and thank the stars for that!) and reinstalled Windows on the SSD and voila! everything works now. I'm having to build Windows back up from scratch, but not counting lost time, that's not a bad thing; the 8300 is faster than ever.
I think I'm going to abandon my plans for a larger, better monitor and just let this system be.
Thanks again for your help.
Ed
RoHe
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November 10th, 2018 12:00
JOcean
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November 11th, 2018 14:00
Great news and glad I had some small part in the fix!
John
buffalokp
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May 25th, 2020 10:00
Tried everything...never thought about the battery. You truly are are Rock Star! Thanks a million.
RoHe
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May 25th, 2020 11:00
You're welcome!