Windows 7: boots up, but just goes to an all black screen with a mouse cursor

Good, you are making progress, The repair install timing depends on too many H/W and S/W factors - hard to predict. But if it runs longer than 1 hour, I would check.

Too bad they did not go with the SSDs. But you have to get that OS off the Raid and away from the data - even if you put a small HDD in (which will of course be a lot slower than an SSD). Here is one I would pick (I have 3 of those): Newegg.com - OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD2-2VTXE60G 2.5" 60GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Yeah! The repair install seems to have worked. Looks like Norton is the only thing that will need to be reinstalled.

I'll work on getting him to upgrade to the SSD. For now need to make sure he replaces that UPS.

Congratulations. Very good. Explain to your customer that he needs to be prepared for all kinds of trouble and not only for a disk failure (therefore images). And seperating the data from the OS is precaution 101. The system on an SSD will, of course, give this system a completely different rythm - fast, fast, fast

Hey, I have a similar issue. I'm trying to service a computer that is running 7 32-bit Home Premium that when I attempt to boot into the OS on the hard disk, it only gives me a black screen and a cursor. No login screen, or anything else. So I figured "I'll just boot into safe mode and fix it". Same problem. I tried using the repair utility, same problem.

I started to think this was the result of corrupted System files, so I tried to boot from an optical disk to try and repair the OS. Here is where it gets weird: the same problem (black screen and only a cursor) occurred when booting from an optical disk! I now think that it's a hardware problem, as I know that this CD works.

Anyone have any ideas?

Checkout this thread:
http://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-d...og-screen.html

I was able to fix it by taking the HD out, putting it as a slave on a 2nd PC. Then Reset all the permissions on the drive.

After that, it was still not working right, but would actually boot after I let it sit at the black screen for a few hours. At that point, I was able to do the repair install.