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Laptop turned off during SP update now blinking cursor on boot.
Hi guys,
I have a Thinkpad r61i running windows 7 64-bit, and all was merry until it decided to run some updates while it was running on battery. Short story, the battery died during the installation and now when I boot it just goes to the black screen with the blinking cursor.
I removed all peripherals, tried to boot from DVD all with no such luck. I really don't care about the files on the dive at this point and am more than happy to reformat and start anew. If the hdd is bad I have a known good one from an old Mac mini.
Barring any suggestions that I haven't tried, how can I go about installing a new copy of windows successfully on either of the drives. I have a Mac mini, the laptop in question and an older dell dimension ( i think dimension 2350desktop running XP.
I'm thinking if somehow I can connect one of these drives to my dell desktop and format/install windows that way...am I totally off there? If that is a workable solution, how do you connect a laptop hdd to a desktop? When I tried using it as an external, it said I couldn't install windows via USB or FireWire. Is a sata to IDE cable what I need to accomplish this?
Again, unable to boot from disks in the current state.
Thanks in advance for all the help.