Installed DSL & used it. Kids ran by and bumped into power button, turning machine off. When turned on again, Dell screen shows up, then screen goes to black with a blinking cursor in upper right corner. Operating system never loads. Tried to get to recovery console from XP disk. Found CD drive didn't work. Ended up having to disconnect it from inside the machine in order to get the machine to boot from the XP disk in the CD-RW drive. The recovery console wants a password--there is no password, but it won't let you bypass (throws you to a dos cursor or tries to reboot after three "wrong" attempts). Ran the Install part of the XP disk and accessed the Repair function. Ran this repair function several times, with no success. The machine will still not boot by itself from the C drive. Any ideas?

Given all the symptoms you described, your PC may have been damaged internally. Nothing you do can revive Windows. You need to take off the cover and inspect the extent of the damage. Better have someone qualified to check it out for you. Meanwhile... The kids ran by and bumped into power button, turning machine off sounds more to me like The kids ran by & knocked the PC off the table. i_XpUser

if you had a cursor maybe you had a floppy disk inside. so remove it and restart. maybe you didn't have to do all that stuff that you did but this kinda happened to me a month ago where the lights went away in my home and windows was stuck on the logo screen. maybe you should have just unplugged the power cord from the outlet jack on the wall. then reconnect everything and start up again. to me it sound like your kids either stepped on the power on/off button on the power supply thing or that they ran over the cord so fast that the cord unplugged itself from the back of your computer. and if the above doesn't work then I guess you have a dead drive just as XpUser said Override everything

Actually, I opened up the box and plugged it in again to see what was moving. There are not any obvious signs of trouble. The CDRom drive kept opening and closing and sounding pretty raunchy--looks to me like it is missing a belt inside. Not too concerned as there is a CD-RW drive, too. The fans are going, no weird smells, no leaking or bulging motherboard items, etc. Couldn't hear or see the hard drive move, but I was able to get a directory listing for the hard drive when I booted with a dos disk. Just FYI, the box was already on the floor, between the desk and the wall. We've already tried unplugging it from the wall and plugging it back in. Can anyone offer any better advice?

You could have damaged the hard drive. Most information I've read on hard drives tell you not to move or make any sudden jerks with the hard drive when it is spinning or powered up. The read/write heads can be damamged. Assuming that it did not happen, reseat all your add-on boards, signal and power connectors on all installed drives and connectors on the motherboard. Then try it again. Does the HDD busy light blink ON & OFF during boot-up?

You could have damaged the hard drive. Most information I've read on hard drives tell you not to move or make any sudden jerks with the hard drive when it is spinning or powered up. The read/write heads can be damamged. Assuming that it did not happen, reseat all your add-on boards, signal and power connectors on all installed drives and connectors on the motherboard. Then try it again. Does the HDD busy light blink ON & OFF during boot-up?

Sorry for the double replies. I bumped my keyboard. You see!