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Win7 Won't Boot, Textless Bluescreen
Rebooted my 32-bit Win7 HP computer after three weeks of uptime. Right after the bios switches to a pure black screen (right before Windows loads, during the time you would try to bring up Safe Mode with F8) the PC encounters a boot problem. A screen pops up. It has a black border around the entire edge and inside the border is pure blue. There is no text, no mouse cursor, and I know Windows has not begun booting. After a short while, the computer auto-restarts, like it had encountered a genuine blue-screen. Is a textless bluescreen even possible?
Safe Mode cannot be triggered. However, if I load a Win7 Repair Disc, my system will tell me to press a key on the keyboard to load the CD/DVD at startup. If I wait for this message to disappear, and then hit F8 as soon as it does, I am then taken to the Safe Mode menu I would normally expect.
Launching windows takes me to the blue screen/black border I described. If I tell it to enable Windows Boot Logging, the text file it produces (%Windir%/ntbtlog.txt) contains four gibberish ascii symbols. I have a second computer in the home and that file contains text you would expect to see. Further proof Windows isn't actually loading.
On the off chance something was up with my MBR, I ran the Win7 Recovery CD. I waited until the first screen came up where I can interact. Here I pressed Shift+F10 to bring up a command prompt. I typed "bootsect.exe /nt60 SYS /force", rebooted, but same issue with Windows not loading. Went back and I tried "bootsect.exe /nt60 ALL /force", rebooted, same issue.
When I try to used the Repair function of the repair disc, it tries to locate my HD's. Immediately it only shows 1 (there are three and multiple partitions), it is Windows, with 0% for partition size, and unknown for the final column. It searches for other hard drives for five minutes or so and then allows me to select the hard drive from the list and click on Next.
I run the repair function but it cannot find any errors. I also sometimes use a program called WinPE Easy Recovery Essentials. It uses, what I assume is, a Live Linux CD and includes an Automated Repair function for Windows 7. This brings up a list of all of my hard drives, and their sizes are reported properly. However, it claims that not a single partition contains a Windows installation.
This same CD contains a file browser. I can see all of the files on my Windows drive. This is how I checked ntbtlog.txt earlier. My problem is that I have no idea what else I might be able to try to diagnose why Windows isn't booting. Any ideas? Thanks!!
Last edited by Mulsiphix; 05 Mar 2017 at 12:40. Reason: modified last three sentences of main paragraph. edited info about bluescreen auto-restart