Dimension 8200 Bizarre Hardware Problem. 1199

James -

Good job policiing this one out. The cursor symptom problem resides somewhere from the system board-BIOS-and initializing the hard drive. For some reason, the system is simply not "grabbing" the boot record on the hard disk, which results in it just sitting there with the cursor as it has nothing to read.

Try this: unplug all other drives from the system board, floppy and opticals, as well as unplugging any network connections. You might also wish to have only monitor, keyboard and mouse plugged externally.

Now see if it reads the disk. It should because it now has *nothing* else to boot to, no other bootable devices from which to choose.

If this works, you may have a loose data ribbon connection to a drive on IDE 2, or a failing optical drive. Same might generally hold true for the floppy drive.

You might also wish to pay special attention to the (front) LEDs on those other drives when attempting to boot (with them still connected). Perhaps an LED will be out of boot sequence or locked-stuck attempting to "read" if the drive is failing.

hth

Stew