black screen with cursor_dims out

[dlpanak]

hello everyone,

my daughter's hp g71 laptop ran into a problem over the weekend - it boots to a blackscreen with only the mouse cursor showing. as soon as the touchpad is touched, the screen and the cursor fade to dim. the computer still seems active and working - the wireless button still responds and the mouse cursor can move on the screen

i have tried:
ctrl-alt-delete no response. shift five times no response. no response to any of the keys except for sleep
safe mode is the same thing - black screen with cursor, no response to ctl-alt-delete or any other key combination that i could find.
all other startup modes under F8 - no change
hard reset - holding power button down for 30sec to 2 minutes with battery and ac power cord removed
startup repair several times - said that it fixed corrupted files tcpip.sys and fwpkclnt.sys - no change to black screen though

my son's laptop is identical - i tried swapping hard drives, and the problem moved with the drive. i used his computer to build a windows 7 repair disk, and booted from it to run chkdsk/r and sfc/scannow (offline mode). both fault and report that there are corrupted files. chkdsk/r completes without any errors. sfc/verifyonly reports that winpe.bmp and schema.dat files are corrupted.

i was able to perform a data backup from the repair manager - i could do a complete reinstall, but that takes a lot of time to get all the software re-installed and updated. this seems like a simple problem, since the laptop still boots and windows tries to start. but i can't find the fix.

thanks very much for the help....

 

[usasma]

The issue with Black Screen errors is that there are many, many different problems that can cause this. I have spent time trying to fix these at work and have given up after 2 weeks of trying on many occasions. On rare occasions we're able to get System Restore to fix it.

So now when we encounter this sort of error, we try System Restore. If that doesn't work, then we just backup the data, wipe the system, and reinstall Windows. It takes much less time than trying all the different fixes that you'll find on the web.

It won't hurt to try and fix it yourself - just Google for Black Screen of Death (or KSoD) and there'll be plenty of suggestions. But in the end most folks just bite the bullet and reinstall Windows.

Good luck!