Black screen on windows logon after power surge

[JohnDoe1980]

Hello. A client brought in a desktop PC that won't boot windows. The client said that they heard a transformer blow prior to this happening. I powered it on and was able to get into the BIOS and see the installed SSD. The Asus Logo shows up, then a black screen (can still see and move the cursor). Tried a different sata power cable. Plugged in windows 10 usb bootable, was able to get into the troubleshooter (startup repair) and ran diskpart form CMD and was able to see the disk. I'm thinking of cloning the drive and seeing if the clone works. Any ideas? Thanks.

 

[Blues]

Given what you have tested so far and the behavior sounds like a data corruption somewhere might need to do a repair install you can try and test some various boot options once you clone assuming the clone doesn't work any better.

 

[JohnDoe1980]

Given what you have tested so far and the behavior sounds like a data corruption somewhere might need to do a repair install you can try and test some various boot options once you clone assuming the clone doesn't work any better.

The clone froze. I cancelled it. I put in a new drive and installed windows fresh. Everything came up fine. Gave the old drive back to the client. Was able to read the old drive in windows explorer just fine but there must have been some corruption or damage at some point.

 

[timeshifter]

Did the client not want any data restored? I recommend using Fab's to do the job.

 

[JohnDoe1980]

Did the client not want any data restored? I recommend using Fab's to do the job.

No, they didn't want any data from the old drive. Apparently it was just an OS, nothing personal.

 

[fincoder]

I had one in my workshop doing this, just a couple of days ago. It was after login (entering PIN) that the screen went black with mouse pointer still moving. After a BIOS update that didn't help, I fixed it by using Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up Task Manager, ran Device Manager from there, removed the Display Adapter including driver files.

After a reboot it logged in OK, and it installed the Windows Update provided driver without further issue.

 

[JohnDoe1980]

I had one in my workshop doing this, just a couple of days ago. It was after login (entering PIN) that the screen went black with mouse pointer still moving. After a BIOS update that didn't help, I fixed it by using Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up Task Manager, ran Device Manager from there, removed the Display Adapter including driver files.

After a reboot it logged in OK, and it installed the Windows Update provided driver without further issue.

Thanks for the input. I'm pretty sure I tried ctrl-alt-delete to no avail. Thankfully they weren't worried about what was on the drive.