I am having a problem with my Dell Inspiron 6000. It just started today.

When I turn it on it goes through the dell boot screen fine. but after that when it would normally load windows i get a black screen with a curser blinking in the upper left hand corner..

This computer worked fine yesterday. And i havn't made any software or hardware changes.

Any ideas before I attempt to reformat the hdd?

I did blow it out with compessed airm it seems pretty clean. hardly any dust came out.

I just took the drive out of my laptop and put it into a USB enclosure and it works fine.. so i will be able to get my data off. I'm still wondering why it won't boot though.

hopefully it is just a boot sector problem and not the laptop itself

Perhaps the drive had come unplugged while inside your laptop?

Do you have a CD or any other media devices attached to your laptop when you try to boot?

Nope nothing. I'm guessing that it had something to do with my boot sector. Last night I Pulled my data off and re installed windows XP and it is working fine. Not sure what the problem was