Vista boots into black screen and mouse cursor then stops

[joydivision]

Got a Dell 1525 and it boots loads Windows fine until it the mouse arrow appears on the screen then it just stops. You can move the mouse arrow, you can press cap locks etc and it responds but it does nothing else.

Has anybody seen this before? I can't do a system restore as for some reason there are no restore points.

It does exactly the same in safe mode etc. I have also tried an automatic startup repair but it dosn't find any problems.

 

[JosephLeo]

There are two methods that I know and use to fix windows vista "KSOD" (blacK Screen of Death)

Method 1:
Press 'F8' while booting and select the "Last known good configuration" setting and hit enter.

Method 2:
Insert a Windows boot disk and select the "repair" option and let it do it's magic.


The problem is usually the result of corrupt system files, so method 2 is always preferred, but Method 1 is the easy way out.

 

[MobileTechie]

Got a Dell 1525 and it boots loads Windows fine until it the mouse arrow appears on the screen then it just stops. You can move the mouse arrow, you can press cap locks etc and it responds but it does nothing else.

Has anybody seen this before? I can't do a system restore as for some reason there are no restore points.

It does exactly the same in safe mode etc. I have also tried an automatic startup repair but it dosn't find any problems.

As far as I can work out, Vista spends a bit of time at that point whilst booting doing various things so I'm guessing anything that halts the progress at that point will cause this. This would explain why there are a loads of "cures" or at least methods of getting around it on the net that only work for some people.

Some people have managed to get explorer.exe running by trying various things like ctrl-alt-del or pressing the shift key six times to get the sticky key dialogue to come up and somehow navigating from there. You can google to get more.

One suspect could be the shell registry key which you can look at offline easily enough.

I've had at least one example of this requiring a reinstall.

 

[TechguyUK]

I've seen this issue three times now (all three were running Vista with SP1) and in all three cases, nothing I tried would bring the existing system back up. So after a number of fruitless hours the end result in each case was to backup the user data and run a fresh install of Vista.

 

[ATTech]

Last Goog Configuration restores the CurrentControlSet key to it's previous state. This helps when the issue is hardware/driver related. If no updates or new hardware was installed just prior to the issue occuring, then it's safe to say that this won't help. It's worth a try, though, because it's a simple thing to try.

I agree with MobileTech, it sounds like it could be related to the shell key in the registry or the userinit binary. I would try an offline registry editor to to check the hive and the start-up binaries.

 

[arrow_runner]

The last time I had this problem I tried everything I could think of and nothing worked. I restored individual and all registry files from a 9 month old copy, that didn't help. I also tried manually restoring individual and then all system32, drivers, and windows files from the restore partition.

 

[joydivision]

Will check the registery but it sounds like it will be a N&P job, I cannot believe that they removed repair install with Vista.

 

[meanderer]

out of 1 windows 7 downgrade experience, you can try one of this that I did for 7. May work for vista as well... at least I hope.

in the registry there is a setting about the string indicating which edition you have installed. My situation was that someone loaded ult in a machine (for chinese language pack) licensed for homepre and windows complained that it was bootleg. I downgraded it back to homepre and reinstall chinese language pack via vistalizator.

Instructions are here http://www.unawave.de/installation/downgrade-en.html?lang=EN

After the upgrade install every app was still working fine.

 

[KM@ Dave]

Will check the registery but it sounds like it will be a N&P job, I cannot believe that they removed repair install with Vista.

I think they may have just removed it from the OEM install disc, but may be wrong.

If you don't want N&P, you can download a Vista repair disc online. I know it's made by Microsoft but unsure if it's available from them for some reason.

 

[iisjman07]

I've seen a chkdsk /r fix the ksod once or twice, but I find most are unrepairable and require a reinstall

 

[Jory]

How long have you left it sit at the black screen? I've seen this happen more than a few times and usually it's an update that is taking forever, or has gone awry. I'd leave it sit for an hour or so and see what happens before doing anything drastic.

 

[joydivision]

How long have you left it sit at the black screen? I've seen this happen more than a few times and usually it's an update that is taking forever, or has gone awry. I'd leave it sit for an hour or so and see what happens before doing anything drastic.

It just restarts if I let it sit, I have not tried disable automatic restart yet so I will be interested if it blue screens, however when it restarts I don't think it is a result of a crash I as I don't get the safe mode screen coming up.

Currently running chkdsk it seems to be taking for ever.

I tried to load the registery in Bart but it won't see the C: drive.

 

[joydivision]

Spent too much time with messing about with the registery etc and nothing makes any difference.

Currently creating a drive image now in prep for the dreaded N&P.