Won't boot past black screen with blinking cursor

The hard drive has issues, or the window files are corrupt. I suggest a computer repair store to retrieve files and test hardware.

well try finding someone who repairs coumpters from their home it is alot cheaper. explain your problem they should tell you weather they can fix it

Check if your hard rive indicator light is flashing (has disc shape icon or can shape icon next to it). If it is then put in your windows disc and do a startup repair. Make sure it is booting from the disc drive first. if it isnt flashing then you may have a dead hard drive. Try taking the hard drive out and putting it back in.

Are you getting the Acer logo on start up? If so you might have a software issue on the hard drive, or the hard drive itself is defective. I suggest using your recovery disc to re-install windows and drivers providing you have them.

Check you do not have a disc in the CD drive or a USB drive connected.

Check the BIOS has the boot order correct, select the hard drive as the first drive to boot from.

If that does not fix it you will need the OS CD and change the boot options to boot from CD first, and try to recover the data.

Change the boot sequence in the bios and let the windows be in the top drive, save changes and exit let it boot from the disk and follow the steps below
Do a repair of your XP installation.
•Boot from the XP CD
•At the Setup screen - Press enter (NOT R for repair)
•PgDn and press F8 for the Licensing screen
•Select the XP installed location and press R to repair
•Setup will copy install files and then reboot the machine DON'T REBOOT FROM THE CD. Let it boot from the hard drive.
•When it is done the process, remove the CD and reboot normally.
This applies to all os like win xp vista and win7

i think the cd is still in the drive. just eject the cd and restart your laptop. it might just tried to boot in your newly created recovery disc.

Regards

Sounds to me like the new motherboard is bad too

Sounds like a bad hard drive to me. Take out the hard drive completely from the laptop and boot up with the windows xp cd and it should go past the blinking cursor. At that point you know you'll need another hard drive.

The Acer Recovery CDs do not set the Boot flag on the hard drive. I had to manually set the boot flag to on using GPARTED Live. After restarting using the GPARTED CD, you can manage the flags under the partition drop down and click on the Boot flag. After exiting GPARTED, I rebooted the laptop and no more black screen....fixed!!
I hope this helps others.