Solved Black screen at boot

[UndeadSon]

Hi everyone, I've been trying to get into windows for 2 days now. Tried everything in system recovery options except recovering from an image as I don't have one. Can't figure out what are these symbols:
Imgur

I have a feeling the only way to fix this is to reinstall windows 7, but I really don't want to do that
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[AddRAM]

#1 Can you get into the bios ?
#2 If so confirm the hard drive is being seen in the bios
#3 If not check the data and power cables on the hard drive, un connect and re connect them
#4 Confirm that the hard drive is not dead

 

[gregrocker]

IN addition everything is here for Troubleshooting Windows 7 Failure to Start leading up to if necessary rescuiing files to run Factory Recovery or do the superior Clean Reinstall Windows 7

 

[UndeadSon]

#1 Can you get into the bios ?
#2 If so confirm the hard drive is being seen in the bios
#3 If not check the data and power cables on the hard drive, un connect and re connect them
#4 Confirm that the hard drive is not dead

Yes, I can and the hard drive is visible not only in bios but also detected by Asus EZ flash 2 utility. I ran chkdsk, there were no problems

 

[UndeadSon]

Finally fixed! I used the windows setup instead of partition wizard to delete the system reserved partition, created it again and formatted. Then strange things started happening when I tried using startup repair, like D: turning into C: and vice versa... So I rebooted and ran startup repair several times. To be honest I wasn't sure what do and whether it's going to work but somehow I managed to do everything right lol. Thanks for the help gregrocker, couldn't have done it without you

 

[gregrocker]

If you recreated the SysReserved partition and it is now labeled System Active in Disk Mgmt (screenshot?) then the Repairs wrote the System boot files to it and made it bootable again.

This is described in Step 10 of Troubleshooting Windows 7 Failure to Start as a last resort and once wasn't included because it was felt to be too complicated for consumers, however it has worked enough for me as a last resort that I finally included it in the tutorial and am delighted it worked for you and hopefully others.

 

[UndeadSon]

It was complicated allright. I hadn't the time to post here right after, and I can't remember how exactly it went, but startup repair ran automatically a couple or few times, but the # of attempts stayed at 1 at first. I also ran startup repair manually after selecting the active partition and the changing drive letters confused me a little at that point. I hope I won't have to use the windows DVD until I buy a new HDD and upgrade to Win 10!

 

[gregrocker]

You should completely ignore the drive letters which are often different in repair boot mode.