How to Fix the Black Screen with White Cursor

This week I fixed a computer that booted through the Welcome screen and the login screen to a totally black screen with only the white cursor and nothing else. The poor cursor was in total darkness! I tried booting into Safe Mode and Last Good Configuration (that worked) and still the cursor stood alone. Heigh-ho the dairy-o, the cursor stood alone.

So I took out the hard drive and attached it to my own computer using this process. It’s not hard. All you need is another computer. And I ran checkdisk and defragmented the drive. Also I ran Malwarebytes and AVG on it.

After this I put the hard drive back in its own case and it booted up all the way through to the desktop. Yay!!!

But it took 3 minutes and 30 seconds to boot. Too slow. So I ran Malwarebytes and AVG again and did all my usual tricks to speed up the computer. When I was finished it booted in 40 seconds. Not bad, huh?
And the cursor stood on the restful TeleTubbies-like rolling green hill landscape of the default Windows XP wallpaper which, according to Wikipedia, was taken near Sonoma, California.

You can also check out How to Fix the Black Screen with White Cursor, Part Two.

I look forward to your comments.