Dell Inspiron boots to black screen with cursor

PocketAppZ

Estimable
Oct 22, 2015
2
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4,510
My aunt gave me a laptop and said that she's had it for almost two years. She also said it was stored away in her closet because she never used it after the original owner gave it to her.

I came home, plugged it in for a few hours so the battery was charged, then powered on the laptop. The initial boot screen displayed with the Dell logo and the word Inspiron below it, followed by a progress bar under that. After the progress bar filled, which only took a couple seconds, the computer displayed a completely black screen except it had a cursor near the top left corner. The cursor is like the one that displays when you're typing in DOS but it was not a blinking cursor.

I can't get F8 to work at all, I can't boot from any type of media (CD/DVD/USB) and resetting the BIOS settings to defaults did nothing. I checked boot order and even tried manually selecting Boot from CD but it does nothing. The disc drive is being accessed but doesn't load or display anything.

If you have any ideas as to how I could fix this problem, or even a clue as to how this ever happened, please feel free to respond. Your input is much appreciated :)

I'm not 100% sure that the laptop had Windows 7 installed on it.