Stuck on flashing dash on startup.

Discussion in 'Windows 7' started by Horwood, Jul 4, 2013.

  1. Horwood

    Horwood MDL Novice

    Jul 4, 2013
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    I recently got the error "A disk read error has occured, press CTRL, ALT and DLTE to restart. I managed to get rid of that error by using startup repair on the Windows 7 disc. I now get a blank screen with a small flashing hyphen on the top left of the screen. Using Windows 7 professional 64-bit. Please help, thank you in advance.

    I'm using a tablet at the moment, my Skype is 'horwood58' if you need to see the problem through my camera.
     
  2. MrMagic

    MrMagic MDL Guru

    Feb 13, 2012
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    Failing HDD ?
     
  3. EFA11

    EFA11 Avatar Guru

    Oct 7, 2010
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    Doesn't sound like repair fixed anything other than make it worse. Run a bootable disk utility and check the drive, if it comes back ok, and you have nothing to save worth saving on the system format the entire drive load windows again. If you have data you want backed up, use the bootable disk utility to move files from the hard drive to a usb device, and then format/load.
     
  4. dewot

    dewot MDL Junior Member

    Apr 25, 2008
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    I have an Asus M/B that gives me that little flashing dash after it has been unable to find c:. Then I have to go into the bios and manually check boot devices / boot sequence.

    Check yer bios!