Driver failure on boot causing black screen  

Hello,

Sorry if I've posted this in the wrong place, but it appears to be a driver problem (Most likely the GPU).

The computer reaches the "Starting windows" animation, but after that boots to a black screen with a cursor, then the hard drive activity light slowly flickers off, I'm not sure if this is of significance, but moving the cursor results in the screen instantly going to the lowest brightness setting.

I've tried to fix this myself and managed to fix it for a short amount of time, but now the problem is occurring again, I'll update my system specs in a second but this is an Acer Aspire 5532 notebook.

All help is appreciated, Thanks for reading.

I'm posting this from safe mode, and here's the ntbtlog.txt.

Please tell me if I've done anything wrong or you need any information, I will gladly do so.

Hello and welcome Dig03 yep some system specs would be handy System Info - See Your System Specs

Run these in safe mode

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1538-sfc-scannow-command-system-file-checker.html

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/433-disk-check.html


Could you also run Speccy and let us know what the temps are too? Speccy - Download < download from piriform.

Try reseating the RAM sticks is another easy thing you can do as is reseating the hard drive - plus it may even be the hard drive failing and the only way to test it is run some tests on another machine if you can access one. There are two I use regularly - SeaTools for Windows | Seagate

and another that will test the actual physical surface of the spinner - Best Free Partition Manager Freeware and free partition magic for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista and Windows XP 32 bit & 64 bit. MiniTool Free Partition Manager Software Home Edition. - see my pic.

Ok Dig sorry for late reply mate the temps are a little more than I wouldlike but not ridiculous.

Now all that remains is to track down this problem

The driver for the GPU is this Legacy

The driver for the VGA is here and the driver list does not include anything hat I can ID as for the chipset so just try this one
Acer | Driver Download

We may even have to go to testing the RAM too see this

MEMTEST

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/105647-ram-test-memtest86.htmlthis one you will need to make a bootable disk set theBIOS to optical (or USB if preferred) boot the machine and let it run for at LEAST 8passes unless the errors come up straight away. Takes fair timeto complete and some leave it running overnight.

Ifthe errors come up quickly then you can stop it and you will have to test eachstick and maybe in each slot to sort the bad one out.


This last suggestion does take a long time to run and you must let it run for at least 8 passes some folks ignore this and miss on errors so be patient but as I stated if the errors come up straight away you can stop because the stick/s will be bad. (see pic it shows errors after 1 pass but it may extend to 5 or 7 or whatever but usually if by 8 passes it is usually safe to find the RAM ok)

Dig03,

Your problem in the ntblog starts with the computer failing on this line:


That's got to do with the Hardware Abstraction Layer, and it's probably why the rest of the drivers are failing to load. Either the Hal.inf file or the Hal.dll file aren't loading properly, and from reading this thread, it looks like it's an intermittent thing.

That could point to a faulty hard disk, but that's just speculation on my part. Did Seatools give you any error messages?

Dig in addition to the Seatools Mellon Head has asked for did you try that physical surface test on the drive with Partition Wizard? It could be something purely mechanical.