Solved Intermittent Black Screen and cursor after logging into Windows 7

[Maghdalena]

I'm dual-booting Windows 7 and Linux Mint 19.3, and I get a black screen with cursor. Usually it resolves to the Windows 7 GUI, but every once in a while the explorer.exe either crashes or doesn't start up, and trying to restart doesn't budge anything, and sometimes, only sometimes (it's intermittent) doesn't resolve to the Windows Gui at all. I heard there's a chkdsk /f/r (not sure if there's a space there), but I haven't tried it because I'm scared I'll do more damage.

Linux (my main driver) boots up just fine, (it's on a separate) SSD drive, and we have no trouble with it at all. The main reason I'm using Windows 7 is because there's a game that's only available on Windows (Farmville 2) from Zygna played on Facebook, but there isn't a workaround the Flash available on Linux yet.

I don't want to take the computer to the computer repair shop since they know what they're doing, but I'd like a way around this issue.

Will the Chkdsk work with a dual-boot, and is there a space between the command (for command prompt) and do I type in "run chkdsk f/r" or do I do that without spaces other than run, or do I just type chkdsk f/r in the safe mode with command prompt, or what do I do? With intermittent it doesn't *look* serious, that the chkdsk might fix it, but I don't know. I'm feeling a crisis of confidence here.

Any help at all would really be appreciated. I'd rather not have the computer shop have to reinstall Windows 7 (I still have the recovery partition. I leave that alone!) , but I will if I have to because they know what they're doing, and I don't. My files are on our external hard drive and the Documents, Pictures, Videos, music and download folders are pointed to the external drive.

Is there any advice you can give me. Please don't tell me our Windows is broken! That would make me very sad, but I"m hoping for the best. As I said, it's intermittent. Two or three days and it works fine, Windows Explorer works and I can play Farmville, then it snags. (I'm writing this in Linux Mint)

I have a HP Compaq 6000 Micro-Tower with Intel Core 2 Duo with 3.0 Ghz 16 GB RAM, 1 TB Hard Drive A Seagate 3 TB External hard drive, SATA 2 DVD R/RW drive if that helps, also the Crucial MX 500 SSD drive at 2 TB. I hope this helps.

Thank you for your time and patience.
Sincerely yours,
Katherine M. Logan

 

[diz]

You can safely run "chkdsk /f /r" in a command prompt window, and will fix your drive at the next restart. But it's unlikely that it will resolve your black screen and cursor issues.

Your troubles can be caused by many things. There is a few things that I would do, like:

- run the command "sfc /scannow" to discard possible file corruptions.
- check and update your video drivers. Make sure you have the correct drivers for your video card.
- make sure your antivirus is updated.
- run "msconfig" and disable all startup programs, and non-microsoft services.

as a last resort you can always reinstall windows, but this will mess with your dual boot and you will have to reinstall the grub from a live usb.

Never played FarmVille. But it seems that it uses a launcher. You can try installing this launcher in Linux Mint with Wine.

 

[Megahertz07]

Open a CMD window as administrator and type:
chkdsk c: /f
It will say your disk is in use and ask if you want to schedule to next start = yes
Restart
Pay attention on the results, specially bad blocks, bad clusters, bad sectors etc

Back to windows, open a CMD window as administrator and type:
SFC /scannow (not scf)


If it finds any corrupted file, fixing or not, restart the computer and run it again 3 more times (SFC + reboot)

 

[Maghdalena]

Your troubles can be caused by many things. There is a few things that I would do, like:

- run the command "sfc /scannow" to discard possible file corruptions.
- check and update your video drivers. Make sure you have the correct drivers for your video card.
- make sure your antivirus is updated.
- run "msconfig" and disable all startup programs, and non-microsoft services.

as a last resort you can always reinstall windows, but this will mess with your dual boot and you will have to reinstall the grub from a live usb.

Never played FarmVille. But it seems that it uses a launcher. You can try installing this launcher in Linux Mint with Wine.[/QUOTE]

You can safely run "chkdsk /f /r" in a command prompt window, and will fix your drive at the next restart. But it's unlikely that it will resolve your black screen and cursor issues.
Sorry to be so long. I totally forgot to mark it as solved being that my computer died and we got a new one with Windows 10, so no longer need to be on this forum or continue. I'm not dual-booting, just with one OS, which seems to be working fine. Thanks for all your help, and all my best. Again, thanks again for the helpful comments.