Soft reboot only brings up a black screen with a smiley face charater

  • Thread starter Thread starter Terry
  • Start date Start date
T

Terry

On three occasions now when I have performed a reboot the machine fails to
enter the OS (windows 2000). Instead I get a screen with a single character
in the bottom left corner. The reset or ctrl-alt-del just return to the
same smiley. However, if I power off and back on all appears to be ok (so
maybe something memory resident?).
I have a small jpg its not the
best picture (better with the flash than without) but I think it shows the
symptom adequately but not sure if this is ok to post for this newsgroup

Searching the net all DOSie type virus activity like this seem to be many
old and nothing new (that I can find). I have performed a full system scan
(McAfee) with latest DAT and nothing is picked up.

Any ideas what this may be?
 
On that special day, Terry, ([email protected]) said...
the machine fails to
enter the OS (windows 2000). Instead I get a screen with a single character
in the bottom left corner. The reset or ctrl-alt-del just return to the
same smiley. However, if I power off and back on all appears to be ok (so
maybe something memory resident?).
Click to expand...

Something is bad in the hardware. No virus causes that "symptom". The
computer is supposed to find a hard disk, identify it, read its first
sector to see if there is a partition, and read the start sector of the
boot partition for loading the operating system (eg Windows XP).

If that fails, no virus can be loaded, as a virus (or worm) needs an
operating system to run on, except the boot sector viruses. But in your
case, there isn't even a "operating system missing, insert disk and
press enter" or similar message. Look for a failing hard drive, a bad
IDE connection, a broken southbridge chip on the mainboard, or something
similar.


Gabriele Neukam

(e-mail address removed)
 
Gabriele,

Thanks for that - an intresting point. I have an Intel motherboard with an
Intel 865 chipset. As you say maybe its an Intel POST error of some sort.

I'll have a hunt around the Intel site.

Regards

Terry
 
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