Black screen, flashing underscore

[idunno]

McAfee was saying that it had gotten rid of a trojan and that I had to restart. I restarted, but when my computer booted up again, I just got a black screen with the flashing underscore. I turn on the tower, then the monitor comes on. At that point I'm on the Dell logo screen where it has those F2 and F12 options. After a few seconds it just goes to that black screen. I've even tried doing that F8 thing for safe mode. Nothing happened. Is there any way to fix this? Any way to prevent it from happening again?

 

[idunno]

C'mon, guys... PLEASE, help me. I don't know what to do anymore. I tried startup repair, system restore and system image recovery. Please. I don't know what I'm doing or what I'm supposed to do. I just really, really need your help. I'm begging you guys here. There must be some sort of solution for this. I can't even reinstall windows because of some compatibility problem. I was going to try custom installation, but I have no idea what I'm doing so I'm not going to mess around with that. But can you please, please, please help me? I'm completely lost now.

 

[usasma]

This is an extremely complicated problem that isn't fixed often.

There are (IME) 2 things to try:
- Open Startup Repair and use System Restore to go back to a time before the issues started happening.
- If this doesn't work (or System Restore is turned off), then backup your stuff and wipe/reinstall Windows.