Hello everyone,
I just acquired a Dell Optiplex 760 from a Garage sale and I have had quite a issue of booting the thing up, the owner said that the HDD in it had failed so he tossed it out. It is a good thing though because I have a 100GB Hybrid drive. When I got home I opened up the one side panel and found nothing out of the ordinary besides a missing HDD, which was expected. The part that really confused me though was that when i first plugged in the drive and booted it up the screen showed the splash screen and then went to a black screen with a blinking dash at the top left corner. Nothing more happened, so thus I tried setting the boot priority and going to the boot menu to boot it directly but when i hit enter on the HDD the screen froze and that is what keeps happening. Basically, either I get the flashy dash or a frozen screen. I have tried taking out the video card and RAM, also I did the system diagnosis and it said everything was normal. Then i turned to the motherboard, no leaking caps or anything out of the ordinary. In the BIOS i tried switching around the boot priority and MR. Blinky dash came back. Using my computer knowledge i think that i have narrowed it down to either the motherboard or the HDD it self. I tried to boot it with a extra Windows 8 CD I had laying around it showed me the blue windows symbol and the little circle but in about 5 minuets restarted and back to the dash. No matter what i have tried it isn't working and the farthest i can get is the dash or a frozen screen. I would really appreciate any help!
-Ianeo5