Blackscreen with Blinking underscore

[CozyBare]

Hi, After cleaning cooling fan of my laptop, on start up. It shows to black screen (light on screen) with blinking underscore no other else. No window logo, etc. I tried the F10 or F11, It's not doing anything. When I did the Windows + B then power button. Just black screen (No light on screen) with blinking light on Caps lock indicator. By the way, before I cleaned the cooling fan. I installed the newest update.

[WAWood]

@CozyBare 

I've run into this myself and when it happens, it means that the PC can not find either the boot loader files or the OS -- and therefore, does not put up any error messages, but just the blinking cursor.

On my PC, this happened when I had mistakenly changed the boot location to the wrong drive -- so there was nothing there to boot FROM.

If you have only one drive and have not been making these kind of changes, that generally means the drive has died or has been disconnected.

To check this, press the ESC key repeatedly while rebooting, and when the HP Startup Menu appears, select the option to run diagnostics -- generally, F2.

[CozyBare]

@WAWood I did what you said, I pressed the ESC button while booting but nothing comes up. I did it a few times.

[WAWood]

@CozyBare 

You have to press it rapidly and repeatedly -- keep tapping it over and over.

If that does not work, then try doing the same with the F2 key.

[CozyBare]

It's not working either.

[CozyBare]

@WAWood It's not working either. Nothing happen. Tried few times.

[WAWood]

Unfortunately, without being able to run Diagnostics using F2, there's no simple way to tell if the drive is bad --which is my suspicion.  I have an HP DV6 and had to replace the drive once already a few years back.

What you can do at this point is remove the drive from the laptop, purchase a USB-to-Drive adapter like the one shown below, hook the drive to a working PC and see if it works.

[CozyBare]

@WAWood Once I have that. How am I going to know if it's working. I mean, is there something I should do?

[CozyBare]

@WAWood, I bought the adapter and plug it in on my desktop. It seems to be working. My desktop was able to read it. System and local disk is filled. Recovery and hp tools are empty

[CozyBare]

Opened the disk management. It says that all 4 are healthy.