Blinking white line at startup

I’m using Windows 7 and every time I restart my computer, it goes to a black screen with a single blinking white line in the top left corner, stays there for about 30 seconds, and then continues with booting. I installed an SSD and one of the things it’s supposed to do is boot quickly but this screen is keeping it from doing that. I searched around and thought it had something to do with the system partition that was on my HDD that I was using as my OS drive before but I deleted it (though I haven’t been able to get rid of the partition entirely, it’s unallocated space) and it’s still doing it. Anyone know how to fix this? Would actually merging the system partition that I deleted into the main drive fix it?

This is a common issue often related to the OS being the OEM version, it can be solved by fixing the master boot record and reconfiguring the bootloader. Try this:

  1. Put the Windows 7 installation disc in the disc drive, and then start your computer.
  2. Boot from the disc
  3. Select a language, a time, a currency, a keyboard or an input method, and then click Next.
  4. Click Repair your computer.
  5. Click the operating system that you want to repair, and then click Next.
  6. In the System Recovery Options dialog box, click Command Prompt.

Type:

Code: Bootrec.exe /FixMbr
Code: Bootrec.exe /FixBoot
Code: Bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd

Press ENTER after each command.
Restart your computer.

Okay so I got around to trying this. I don’t know if I did something wrong but doing what you said added the Windows installation from my other HDD to the boot manager and didn’t fix the white line thing. There was a repair pop up when I got to the repair screen though, and doing that fixed it. I just had to remove the second OS from the boot screen. This seemed to have fixed it though.

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