i have pclos in a dual boot with windows xp. pclos on a secondary harddrive and windows on the first. pclos was working just fine and i shut down the computer and unplugged the pclos harddrive to put in a temporary one to get some stuff off of it and burn it to a dvd. after this i plugged the pclos hard drive back in and it gave me the boot menu and it went through and did a file system integrity check or something to that affect, it does this quite often after reboots, and it normally boots right up after that. but this time it does the check, then it reboots again, and skips the check and goes to a black screen with one white underline at the top left hand corner and sits there.

any idea what is wrong with it(perhaps its not a software but a hardware problem)?
and how would i go about fixing it.

i've experienced this before. try unplugging and replugging the second harddrive and rebooting. sometimes the cables don't connect well, or, in my case, fail due to repeated connecting/unconnecting, and i had to replace the cable...

i havent had a chance to try unplugging it yet. i've been away from home busy. and i have a download that i want to hurry up and finish. So if i unplug it and plug it back in, and it still will not boot, i should try a new cable. Is it odd that i can get files off of the linux hard drive, such as mp3's and listen to them and yet the os will not load?

If its not hardware related lilo may have some how got messed up.

Try reinstalling lilo:

Using the LiveCD do the following:
Login as root then:
* Open a konsole (Startmenu -> Terminals -> Terminal Program (Konsole) and type "redo-lilo".
* Follow the on-screen directives and when done, reboot to your repaired bootloader and log in to your PCLinuxOS installation.
http://www.pclinuxonline.com/wiki/InstalledPclosFaq