I have a dell computer with Intel Pentium 4 Processor at 2.20GHz. It works well for almost two years then it suddenly can't load the window one day. The pc started normally until it passes the windows xp logo, then a black screen appear with only the mouse pointer active on top of the black screen. I tired to restart the windows by hitting F8 and chose the restore to the last good known setting, failed; I tried to open the dos mode and the safemode, but only black screen. I ran the dell system utility check, all the hardware tests passes. I tried to format the hard drive by inserting the windows xp disk and set the ide cdrom drive as the default boot device, however, a msg saying strike f1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utilities" pops up following by a beep sound. I tried to reboot the pc again, same black screen with the mouse pointer active on top of the black screen and I can hear the sound of the win xp disc running inside the cd rom. I also noticed a msg saying DISK DRIVE 1 SEEK FAILURE whenever I tried to boot from cd rom or hard drive! Does replacing the CMS battery helps? Can someone please help me about this.

I have also check the error log through the setup screen with a message saying CMOS checksum error!

Try resetting BIOS to defaults.

Rule #1 Good computers don't go down.
Rule #2 There is no such thing as a good computer.

Hi
I have the same problem with my windows xp. I found a solution by searching google (search= virus black screen). This gave me a link to support.microsoft and a solution is provided. That black screen is there because either the master boot record, partition tables, boot sector or NTLDR file are corrupted. Good luck

Did any of the solutions provided work for you? I am having the exact same problem as you were.