Dell Laptop Black Screen with mouse cursor at boot

[Velvis]

I replaced a screen on a Dell Laptop and all was working fine except for the touchscreen portion. Windows booted and I logged in with the password.


Because of the touchscreen issue I did some research and tried uninstalling the I2C entry in the device manager that had the yellow exclamation mark and then scanned for new hardware. It made no difference. The entry in the device manager said it couldn't start the device.

At that point I figured I would update the device drivers from the dell website.

The Dell website ID'd the computer and was downloading and installing and handful drivers.

I left the room and came back to a black screen with a working mouse cursor.

F8 pops up the projector multi-montior window but changing any of that makes no difference.

I connected a second monitor and it has the same black screen and mouse (it behaves like it should in that it can be extended, or duplicated, etc. but it is just the black screen and mouse cursor.

Pressing the shift key 5 times pops up the sticky keys windows.

CTRL-ALT-DEL does nothing, CTRL-ALT-ESC does nothing.

I have tried rolling back the latest updates, which seems to do nothing or in the case of one of the options gives an error preventing the rollback.

Safe mode requires the bitlocker key.

I have a feeling the bitlocker will be difficult to retrieve as they likely never took note of it. (This is a personal laptop not a business laptop.)

Before I go through trying to track down the bitlocker key is there anything else I can try to get back into windows?

 

[timeshifter]

Before I go through trying to track down the bitlocker key is there anything else I can try to get back into windows?

My vote is no.

 

[Velvis]

I came back a few hours later and the computer was at the Windows desktop. Touchscreen still doesn't work though but I'm going to try and get the bitlocker key first.

 

[nlinecomputers]

but I'm going to try and get the bitlocker key first.

Lesson learned, always grab that as part of initial evaluation. I don’t always remember either but it is going to be an issue as we see more systems with it fully activated.

 

[britechguy]

I don’t always remember

One of the reasons I've put together a couple of checklists. There's no way I can reliably retain the different things I need to do under different conditions in memory.

Now that Windows 11 is becoming ubiquitous, and will only become more so, I need to add, "Fetch Bitlocker Key," to a couple of checklists.