A very interesting blinking cursor problem...need major help

dellhell, we do appreciate your contribution - thank you. On numerous occasions I've seen posts on WinDrivers saying people have found the answer to their current problem in an older topic, so it's always good to have such information available.

And please guys, I don't see the point in arguing with dellhell's experience. A BIOS with the Phoenix bitshift algorithm bug for example can report the size of a large drive correctly, operate normally for as long as no access beyond 137G is required, but the instant it is it all falls in a heap. A BIOS update that correctly implements 48bit LBA could cure this.

Hey, this thread's still open and i'e had this same problem for SIX MONTHS before finally looking it up on the net, so here i go.

I am coming down firmly on the side of dellhell. Just about every machine built before 2005 probably has this limitation (remember HDDs were only 40-60GB at that time, 100GB was the ultimate), and it's completely masked if you never install a large HDD. elaborate details are in this thread from Toms hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/23...rge-hard-drive

It does not matter if it is a fresh install or a clone. Initially neither method will cross the 128GB boundary (137,438,953,472 bytes), but eventually something will and on the next restart, you'll get the blinking cursor in the upper left.

XP utils FIXMBR and FIXBOOT WILL NOT correct this.

Win98SE FDISK /MBR will not help either. Nor will vendor specific items (like IBM's ThinkPad Recovery partition access util), because this is not an MBR problem, but rather a condition where some bit of XP boot information has strayed past the 128GB boundary on the HDD.

A fresh re-install or re-cloning will always work, until you stray over the limit again.

Further even though thisis an old post, the 3rd post from noonoo is completely wrong (I don't care if he has 100,000 posts, that statement is in error). FDISK/MBR will NOT harm an NTFS partition, in fact it is a quicker and easier way of fixing a boot disk that XP has stomped on and assigned the wrong drive letter. See this site for further information on the subject: http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.shtml

Re-sizing the boot partition will instantly correct the condition and the HDD will boot. I've done this and it works fine. You can then use the rest of the HDD as a logical partition for your data files.

Bottom line?? If you install a larger than 128GB HDD on an older machine be aware of this and set it up as a 128GB boot drive if your machine cannot support the 48 bit LBA addressing scheme.

Thanks for the researched, detailed, accurate, and referenced feedback cadillacmike. It’s nice to get a response from someone who knows through experience what they are talking about and who adds to the knowledge bank. It sure beats the distraction of flaming attempts from high quantity/low quality attention seeking posters that plague all forums.

Yep – it’s either upgrade the BIOS to support 48-Bit LBA if possible or else keep the partition size below 128 GB on these old computers. My GX260 with BIOS version A09 is still running sweet from a 465 GB partition on the internal IDE drive and a 20” inch Dell 2007 WFP panel. Using the old girl to post this.

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Originally Posted by dellhell

..the distraction of flaming attempts from high quantity/low quality attention seeking posters that plague all forums.

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THE reason I took a long hiatus from this forum. I just come here now because I'm bored.

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Originally Posted by dellhell

Thanks for the researched, detailed, accurate, and referenced feedback cadillacmike. It’s nice to get a response from someone who knows through experience what they are talking about and who adds to the knowledge bank. It sure beats the distraction of flaming attempts from high quantity/low quality attention seeking posters that plague all forums.

Yep – it’s either upgrade the BIOS to support 48-Bit LBA if possible or else keep the partition size below 128 GB on these old computers. My GX260 with BIOS version A09 is still running sweet from a 465 GB partition on the internal IDE drive and a 20” inch Dell 2007 WFP panel. Using the old girl to post this.

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Thanks dellhell. Now if i could only learn how to type :D Over 25 years in the IT industry and I'm still a 2-finger hacker! ;) I go all the way back to the original PC & DOS 1.1. I need to clear my bookshelves out of all those old manuals some day. :o

Once i re-sized my HDDs to 128GB boot partition and a single logical drive in the extended partition, i've been completely free of the "BoD" aka Blink of Death. Now i can take a single HDD with file changes / updates from my home & duty station to update.

Just to let everyone know what i used, It was Acronis Disk Director 10 (no need to get v11) for re-sizing and their True Image 11 for the cloning. I can't be bothered with their backup / recovery, i don't like proprietary backup routines, and I have several spare HDDs for use as backup clones and others for file transfer / synching. My old favorite for these disk operations was Power quest's partition magic (I have v3 & v8) but once symantec got a-hold of it, well, you know... Acronis is the true leader in this segment now, and being forced to become an expert with them, they do work great.

I'm using some old ThinkPad T30s - yeah ancient, but they work! I have a 500GB SATA with a SATA to PATA Thinkpad Ultrabay HDD tray, and i can update that HDD from one T30 to the other, in about 10 mins. I've been trying to do this for months, and Finally can stop lugging the computer case with me when i go home on the weekends.

Interesting thing, the T30 can see and format a large HDD. I used XP Diskpart to create and format the 250, 320 & 500GB HDDs, but even with the last available IBM BIOS, booting over 128GB is not reliable. It doesn't matter to me, on all my old desktops & towers, i never put the data files on the same HDD as the OS. I always used separate physical drives or at least volumes. So, I'm back to that on Laptops. It's feasible with a Thinkpad and a dock that has its own Ultrabay, because the DVD/CD can go there with the HDDs in the internal bays. I can even attach a USB FDD (or the special IBM cable to the little port in the back) for a 4th drive (FDD).

In any event happy holidays to all, I'll scan the threads once in a while. While I haven't seen it all, I have seen most if it... :devil:

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Originally Posted by cadillacmike

Thanks dellhell. Now if i could only learn how to type :D Over 25 years in the IT industry and I'm still a 2-finger hacker! ;) I go all the way back to the original PC & DOS 1.1. I need to clear my bookshelves out of all those old manuals some day. :o:

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I am a mechanical engineer over the last 25 years but as I started out trying to financially justify various projects using Lotus 123 on an IBM XT with a 20MB hard drive running DOS 3.1, I know what you mean.

Going off topic if I may, pretty much everything I learned about computers has been forced on me by problems I had to resolve on the units I use at work or for my kids at home.

While Microsoft made some great products, the lack of proper in-built security and backup was, and arguably still is, a major flaw. Having to use third-party applications to address these flaws causes all kinds of user issues such slow boot/shut down, slow performance, conflicts, general time-consuming complexity and additional costs.

My kids tend to spend much more time on their smart phones, iPod Touches and iPads now than on Windows (telling in itself) and I never hear – “Dad, my IOS device has froze/crashed/app will not work, etc….”. Stuff may happen but these devices are so intuitive the kids can resolve the issues themselves. So while the IOS or Android devices have nowhere near the range of capability of a Windows PC, they do what they do real fast and real well.

With regard to the backup solutions you have highlighted, I agree that Acronis is a very capable product but you need to be careful what features you use and what you use them for. The 2009/2010 versions had problems with SATA drives and RAID systems.

I found Casper to be the neatest and most fool proof cloning application for total and immediately bootable backup of all of my non-Raid systems.

However, I have two Sony VAIO laptops with pre-configured Intel Matrix Storage Manager RAID 0 systems – risky in terms of the potential for data loss. I found the bootable rescues media CDs for both Acronis TI Home 2009 and Casper 5.0/6.0 could not see the RAID systems on these laptops as the CDs are Linux based and did not have the required drivers.

To back-up the VAIO RAID 0 systems, I had to resort to the excellent Storagecraft Shadowprotect Desktop that has a Windows PE based bootable rescue media CD.

I just thought I would stick my nose in this thread since it has been revived.

Perhaps I need to clarify my 3rd post and add to my post count:)

Under certain circumstances such as multiboot machines, machines with dynamic disks and machines that contracted a stealth virus, Fdisk /mbr can royally screw up your PC.

Extra Reading if you are interested
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/69013/EN-US
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/166454
http://forums.windrivers.com/showthread.php?t=29431


Given that many users read down to the first fix and try it without reading any caveats, the intention of the post was to prevent people grabbing their Dos boot disk and rewriting the MBR making recovery pretty much impossible.