Win 7 black screen of death

[MobileTechie]

Before I N&P this sucker I thought I'd ask just in case anyone has any ideas I've not heard of.

Win7 machine, black screen of death (on boot you get as far as a black screen with movable mouse pointer but no further). When I got it it wouldn't respond to any tricks such as sticky keys or Ctrl-Alt-Del etc.

As per my standard pre-fix procedure, I've checked the disks and they're fine as is the memory.

Things I've tried:

System restore - no points available
Chkdsk - nothing wrong
Startup repair - cannot repair
Offline SFC - all OK
Safemode and all other F8 options - same result
Offlne virus scans - nothing
Manual reg restore from Regbak - no change
Reset permissions to default using a boot disk and icacls - this did actually help. I got very excited for about 10 seconds. Now I have the Windows background and it responds to the sticky keys trigger (multiple shift key presses) but it also flashes every 10 seconds as if the screen is being reset. This suggests permissions are involved I'd say.

Off the back of that I renamed turned sethc.exe into cmd.exe and used the sticky key trick to spawn a command prompt and launched explorer.exe - very slowly the windows desktop and task bar appeared but it gets "reset" every few seconds so the command window vanishes and you cannot use it again.

That's it.

Any other ideas?

 

[Kitten Kong]

hard drive diag by any chance?, or a win 7 repair.

 

[MobileTechie]

HDDs are fine.

How can you do a Win7 repair intall if it doesn't boot? I've never managed that.

 

[Kitten Kong]

HDDs are fine.

How can you do a Win7 repair intall if it doesn't boot? I've never managed that.

Sorry Neil, I thought it booted, and black screened, afterwards. Not during the boot up process.

 

[contrive]

re:

When you boot into safe-mode, how far does it get?

What is the last file that attempts to load before freezing?

Do you have any pre-crash info?

Just off the top of my head, without knowing the pre-crash history, i'm going to say:

1> virus may be removed but let damage behind

or

2> corrupt video drivers

 

[MobileTechie]

It gets to the same point with all boot modes. It stalls just during the black screen with mouse pointer that you get just before the windows desktop appears. All drivers etc have been loaded by this point.

I don't think a virus is involved as 2 different offline scans show no traces of malware and they've not reported one.

Since it makes no difference if you use safemode or vga mode I don't think video drivers can be implicated.

 

[NYJimbo]

I don't think a virus is involved as 2 different offline scans..... .

Do you mean offline like slaved to another machine or bootdisk scan ? What did you use ? Some programs are pathetic at finding bootkits, others dont scan for them until the end and others find them in the first few seconds.

 

[MobileTechie]

Do you mean offline like slaved to another machine or bootdisk scan ? What did you use ? Some programs are pathetic at finding bootkits, others dont scan for them until the end and others find them in the first few seconds.

In this case a boot disk since it's on RAID0. I use Kaspersky Disk and Microsoft's Standalone Sweeper on the DART disk. Nothing.

 

[joydivision]

Do you have a spare drive? If so clone it, and see if it will work from that. I had something similar, turned out to be faulty drive, would pass all the test but cause the OS to scrash.

 

[NYJimbo]

So many of these end up an N&P. Not sure why MS cant come up with something to get us past this black screen, I mean it looks like the machine is up but it cant get to the next step.

Can you still get the CMD at this point (in any way) ? If you type in Win7 cmd like running devmgmt.msc for instance, does that come up and remain up ?

 

[MobileTechie]

yes if you reread the OP you'll see I did make some progress with command prompt.

 

[NYJimbo]

yes if you reread the OP you'll see I did make some progress with command prompt.

I wasn't sure if it was stable. Maybe you can create a new user ? If this is dying at the desktop I am guessing there is no secondary account so no login ? I could be wrong but if there is a second profile you might find a way to get control of this.

Get a command prompt and run "net user" to see how many users there are, TYPICALLY you will see administrator, guest and the main user. If that is all then create a new one:

net user /add test1 testpass

of course thats user name "test1" with the password "testpass"

then do a "net user" to confirm.

This is a MS page of crap you can do with net user if you actually can use it on this machine:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/251394

Reboot the machine and see if you now get the multi user login screen, if so go in via the new user and see if you got control. It will likely inherit some of the original account stuff, not sure how much. But that might confirm you have more system left that we thought.

 

[FoolishTech]

net user /add test1 testpass

or

echo y|net user testuser * /add

or I guess just this would work

net user testuser /add

for no password (couldn't resist...)

EDIT: oh, and to make that user an admin so if you do login to a desktop and need to perform additional repairs, follow that command immediately with:

net localgroup Administrators testuser /add

 

[NYJimbo]

Could also do "net user administrator /active:yes"

to turn on administrator, but it might already be corrupted and a new user might have a fresh desktop.

 

[contrive]

N&p

I know its hard to admit it to oneself but, there comes a point where extensive diag. becomes counter-productive.

I'm not big on the RAID thing but just as business sense, I wouldn't spend more than a day on this considering a re-install and restore would only take about 3hrs. That is, IF you're 100% sure the HDD(s) isn't failing.

Best Wishes!

PS: Awesome Logo!

 

[ell]

Before I N&P this sucker I thought I'd ask just in case anyone has any ideas I've not heard of.

Win7 machine, black screen of death (on boot you get as far as a black screen with movable mouse pointer but no further). When I got it it wouldn't respond to any tricks such as sticky keys or Ctrl-Alt-Del etc.

As per my standard pre-fix procedure, I've checked the disks and they're fine as is the memory.

Things I've tried:

System restore - no points available
Chkdsk - nothing wrong
Startup repair - cannot repair
Offline SFC - all OK
Safemode and all other F8 options - same result
Offlne virus scans - nothing
Manual reg restore from Regbak - no change
Reset permissions to default using a boot disk and icacls - this did actually help. I got very excited for about 10 seconds. Now I have the Windows background and it responds to the sticky keys trigger (multiple shift key presses) but it also flashes every 10 seconds as if the screen is being reset. This suggests permissions are involved I'd say.

Off the back of that I renamed turned sethc.exe into cmd.exe and used the sticky key trick to spawn a command prompt and launched explorer.exe - very slowly the windows desktop and task bar appeared but it gets "reset" every few seconds so the command window vanishes and you cannot use it again.

That's it.

Any other ideas?

I'm having the same ksod in win 7 in all modes. Pretty much done the same except the permissions. Is there a way to use D7 through a boot cd like hirens to repair permissions? I tried it but nothing seemed to work with it.

 

[BillMoney]

Try fix mbr

If not nuke and pave have had a lot of those lately also check hard drive settings in bios that may work

 

[ell]

Even though I had time to play around with it some more, I finally just nuked/paved, I guess if theres no
way to boot to safe mode you're screwed.