Restart leads to black screen before windows 7 splash screen

I am not sure what's wrong, but I have uninstall nvidia drivers that gave me problems ie. 257.21, 196.21....etc. I am currently using 195.62. I am certain that it was a VGA driver problem, because it never happened again, till I decided to remove windows internet explorer and it did the black screen thing again. It restarts and instead of showing windows splash screen it shows a black screen. When I am at the black screen I can't do anything, I will have manually restart and when it boots up the second time it will load windows. It's ____ me off. I hope someone can help me here, and I appreciate it. Atm I am gonna reinstall IE 8 and let's hope for the best.

PS. I just bought this new HDD WDVELOCIRAPTOR 300GB. So it's brand new. Don't know what's going on.

Hmmm! Been having the same problem myself with 7 ultimate 64 bit. It only happens on a "restart". Cold boot works OK.
I just hit my reset button, get message to do startup repair or start windows normally.
Select the "normal" and all seems to work OK???????
I'd be interested if you can find a resolution to this issue. I gave up on it!!!

hnm i dont even get the startup repair option. Well i resetted the Cmos before i left for work i got "verifying dmi pool data.......update success"
so i believe it should be fixed letme try it when i get home.

I just did all the things that lead to the black screen. And all is fixed as of now, after a CMOS reset.

I've been having a similar problem. I have 2 hard drives, one with Vista (32 bit, not sure which version..) and the other with XP / 7 (ultimate x64). Until just about an hour ago, everything was fine, i had a multi-boot screen and could pick whatever OS i wanted and they would all boot. Just an hour ago, however, i ALT-Tabbed out of Mount & Blade to check facebook when the computer froze for the first time in well over three months. I didn't think much of it and pressed the little reset key, and the boot chokes on "Detecting IDE drives..." This happens a lot for some reason and is usually resolved by me wiggling the SATA cable coming out of the HDD (it's loose i suppose...).

When that didn't work, i began to worry and eventually got it to see both drives through mainly persistence. After that part, the computer checks for some other stuff, all of it works, and then instead of my 'select what operating system to boot to' screen, it just goes black. Eventually i get a blinking cursor in the top left, but no developments from there. I've let it sit for maybe 20 minutes and nothing happened. I obviously have access to another computer, but this $300 laptop is no substitute for my $1300 desktop.

I would appreciate any help i can get. The search terms in google are appearantly very similar to annother known problem where the computer gets to the windows 7 splash screen then goes black, but i'm not even getting there. I can't select boot into vista, xp or 7.

if this helps:
I went into the BIOS and changed boot order and got to the XP splash screen just fine, but my XP install is flawed and bugged, so like always it BSDs before loading. This is normal for my XP and probably isn't part of the problem. By booting to that HDD first, it circumvents the OS selection screen entirely, but doesn't get me into 7

Sounds like a bad Windows install or corrupt Windows file. Backup, wipe and reinstall. I personally keep a Ubuntu live USB handy to back up the data.
*Windows Explorer should not be uninstalled because it is part of system files.

Interesting development:
I reset the CMOS and turned the computer on. Nothing. I turned it off and on again. Nothing. Needed to use the bathroom so said "what the hell" and turned it on and let it sit. Came back a few minutes later and just as I sat down to turn it off, my multi-boot screen! Booted into 7 just fine now. No problems except for a severe sense of confusion. Closest thing I can come up with for a solution is reset Cmos and persistence.

When I got into 7, it told me that it re-detected all of my drives and that I needed to reboot. I was hesitant to turn it off, as you can imagine... Any sleuths in the audience would attribute the length of this post to my waiting for it to boot and stalling for time. It works perfectly... I got nothing for a solid solution... Reset CMOS?

Did you change any RAID settings or overclock your FSB/CPU/memory?

Nope, everything at factory settings. One of my first steps when it happened was restore default BIOS settings, but it didn't do anything. Before the crash, the only think i changed was disabled my FDD and changed HDD boot priority anyways.

Hm, clearing CMOS does just that- of clearing all the modified data and setting it to default. So when you said "nothing" before, did the computer post at all?