Black screen with movable mouse cursor before login screen appears

[ronmar002]

Hi, I have an office desktop pc (HP COMPAQ ELITE 8100) running 64-bit Windows 7. I was manually running Windows update and manually updating some of my drivers when the pc suddenly turned itself off.

I turned it back on and now it doesn't get to the login screen anymore. It just displays a black screen with a movable mouse cursor although I can't really click anything or even press any keys on the keyboard.

I tried loading into the recovery environment but it only gives me the option to restore my hard drive to factory settings, which I don't want since I have lots of important files in it.

I've searched around the forums but I can't find a problem that is EXACTLY like mine.

By the way, my pc is on a dual boot mode with an Ubuntu 11.10 and that is how I'm able to access this forum right now. The dual boot was set-up by the employee that I replaced so I have no idea how this is set-up.


Any help would be appreciated!
-Ron

 

[x BlueRobot]

Firstly, boot into the Linux operating system, and then create a backup of all important files and data.

 

[ronmar002]

Managed to figure out where to get my files from the windows OS, after I backed them up to an external hard drive, is the only option left for me is to format the hard drive completely? That's the only option given by Windows recovery environment and as much as possible I would like to find a way around that.

 

[x BlueRobot]

Try following - http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/219533-troubleshooting-windows-7-failure-boot.html

 

[ronmar002]

all of the three safe modes result to the same black screen with movable cursor, will try to find a win7 disk to boot from

 

[x BlueRobot]

Have you scanned with any infections?

Linux can corrupt the Windows MBR if it hasn't been dual booted correctly.