Black Screen after Windows Update (Windows 10)

Hi folks,

Not sure where to ask this question (posted both here and on TenForums) as this involves both Win7 and Win 10.

Background

I had an old DELL laptop (originally running Vista) which I upgraded to Windows 7 some years ago (genuine copy of Win 7 Home Premium) and again upgraded to Windows 10 around July last year.

Given that the laptop is some 8 years old and ran both Windows 7 and Windows 10 without a problem, I was a happy bunny - until last week that is.

After a Windows Update, the machine re-booted to give a black screen with a flashing white cursor in the top left hand corner. Nothing else. Leave for several hours - no difference. No HDD activity either.

I can't boot into Safe Mode - I still get black screen with flashing white cursor.

Removing the HDD and putting it in an external USB caddy, I can read all the files/data in the drive - such as photos and documents which leads me to suspect that the update screwed the boot area of the OS somehow.

My questions for Windows 7 forums are these...

If I have to reinstall the OS (Win 7) on the HDD, can I still download Windows 10? I presume that I can, since I already did that last year.

What is the process of reinstalling Windows 10 - I presume that I can't simply d/load an .iso of WIn 10 to stick onto the HDD because the upgrade needed a valid Win 7 license? If I can download an .iso of Win 10, can I input the Win 7 licence into Win 10 to activate it?

Any help gratefully appreciated.

Zaph

Hi Mega,

Thanks for the reply. Sorry for not being clear.

The laptop in question had been upgraded to Windows 7 Home Premium from Vista.

I took advantage of Micro$oft's generous (!) offer last year and upgraded the laptop to Windows 10 over the existing Windows 7 OS - ie no separate Win 7 & Win 10 partitions and no clean install either.

It has all run very smoothly until a Windows Update last week went south.

On a cold start up, the laptop goes to a black screen with flashing white cursor in the top left hand corner.

No hard drive activity or further indication of the OS loading - even if I leave the laptop on for 8-10 hrs overnight.

No beep codes or error messages.

Before upgrading to Win 10 I had cloned the HDD and the old (ie Win 7 HDD) is now in the machine and everything works - proving that it isn't a hardware issue (i.e. motherboard/bios/mempry problem).

Machine with Windows 10 HDD in won't even boot into safe mode.

With the Win 10 HDD in an external caddy and the Win 7 HDD in the machine, I can browse the files on the external drive and open them - proving it isn't a physical problem with the HDD.

With the Win 10 HDD in the machine, I've run various HDD testing programs and they report no HDD errors.

So, my only conclusion is that the boot sector programs have become corrupted in some way by update.

In your reply you said "If you did a Win 10 upgrade over win 7 you can use the win 10 recovery options. You may have to disable fast boot on BIOS to use mouse and keyboard and press F8."

How, exactly do I do this? The machine is totally unresposive with black screen/flashing underscore cursor. F keys do nothing ans power button immediately shuts the machine down.

Having done a bit of research for Win 10 / Black Screen on boot, I have yet to test if after several minutes the moving the mouse does anything and pressing the space-bar or Win+P keys, down arrow twice followed by the Enter key.

You also said "You can always do a clean install on any computer that had win 10 activated. Download Win 10 and during installation leave the key blank. It will activate as you had Win 10 before."

Again, how do I do this and how does M$ know that I had already activated Win 10 on that PC if I don't enter a (Win 7) license key during a clean install??

Very puzzled

Zaph