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Animation of the flashing cursor Somtimes, the HP laptops stop at a black screen with a flashing cursor in the top left corner (instead of booting to Windows XP). The problem is almost always due to the hard drive’s Master Boot Record (MBR) becoming corrupt. A fix is to use a special CD to boot up the laptop and transfer a good MBR to the hard drive. Instructions for creating and using the special CD are below:

Download the Necessary Files

From a working PC, Download this 872-kilobyte ZIP archive and extract the contents...
Or separately download Small CD Writer (312 KB) and CD image to burn to disc (1.81 MB)

Create the CD

  1. Insert blank CD-R (or CD-RW) into disc drive
  2. Launch smallcdwriter.exe
  3. Click Disc menu > Record ISO image to disc
  4. Browse to the mbrfixer.iso and slect it....
  5. Wait for disc to burn and automatically eject
Screenshot of smallcdwriter

Boot from the CD

Boot up the non-working HP laptop from the CD:
In order to choose Disc drive as boot device, you might have to press F9 while laptop starts up.

Once booted, answer yes (press Y) when prompted.

Screenshot of booting

You should get a confirmation message that the MBR was successfully restored.
Eject the disc, and press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reboot.
Cross your fingers that laptop will boot in to Windows XP!

Update 2007 November

A BIOS update (version F.0D) seems to be a permanent solution; call the HelpDesk for details.

Page created 9:50am 24 May 2007; updated 10:00pm 14 Nov 2007