boots up, but just goes to an all black screen with a mouse cursor

[rick619]

Hi,
I need to do a repair install on a Windows 7 x64 PC. Is there a way to do this with the DVD if you can't login to the PC?

It boots up, but just goes to an all black screen with a mouse cursor. I can move the mouse, but ctrl + alt + del doesn't do anything. There is nothing else on the screen other than the mouse cursor.

I have tried the startup repair, no help.

I tried system restore, says no restore points found.

 

[whs]

It boots up, but just goes to an all black screen with a mouse cursor

Is that when you boot from the system or from the CD?

 

[rick619]

It boots up, but just goes to an all black screen with a mouse cursor

Is that when you boot from the system or from the CD?

From the system. Can boot to the DVD fine, but none of the built in utilities will help.

 

[whs]

If you have the installation DVD, you can make a repiar/install booting from the DVD ( http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/3413-repair-install.html ). But read the warning in the tutorial regarding SP1. If you already installed SP1, it may not work.

 

[rick619]

The repair install won't work -- I had posted in that thread. It won't work because the OS is essentially not functioning at all. You don't get prompted to login, it just goes to that black screen. You can't bring up task manager, can't run DVD's/CD's. Safe mode is the same, etc.

I'm hoping to be able to fix this -- it's for a customer of mine. It took a day and a half to install all his software and get everything configured. My company would be billing him by the hour, won't be cheap. I'm hoping to fix it and save him some money.

 

[whs]

1. I do not understand why you did not make an image after 1 1/2 days of work - but that is water under the bridge. But for next time I really recommend it. Then you could bail yourself out in 20 minutes. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/73828-imaging-free-macrium.html?ltr=I

At the point where you are, I suggest you burn the bootable CD of this program. Boot that from the optical reader (change the boot sequence in the BIOS) and inspect the HDD. One possibility is that you lost the active partition and the MBR cannot get at the bootmgr. Usually in Win7 it is the 100MB hidden partition, but if the installation was not done right, the bootmgr could be floating on another partition.

You can set the partition attributes in the Partition tab > Modify. For us to help you look at the disk(s) it would be useful if you could take a readable picture (with a camera) of the PW window and post it here.

 

[rick619]

1. I do not understand why you did not make an image after 1 1/2 days of work - but that is water under the bridge. But for next time I really recommend it. Then you could bail yourself out in 20 minutes. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/73828-imaging-free-macrium.html?ltr=I

At the point where you are, I suggest you burn the bootable CD of this program. Boot that from the optical reader (change the boot sequence in the BIOS) and inspect the HDD. One possibility is that you lost the active partition and the MBR cannot get at the bootmgr. Usually in Win7 it is the 100MB hidden partition, but if the installation was not done right, the bootmgr could be floating on another partition.

You can set the partition attributes in the Partition tab > Modify. For us to help you look at the disk(s) it would be useful if you could take a readable picture (with a camera) of the PW window and post it here.

Thanks for the info, I will give that a try.

A little more background on the PC: It has 2 x 1TB HD in a RAID1 (mirror). The data is backed up regularly, so that isn't the problem. I was able to boot with a UBCD for Windows (PE) and copy some of his data.

The problem occurred when there was a power outage. He has a battery backup (not supplied by my company) that seems to have failed since the power was out for under 10 seconds. When it came back on, this was the result. He has a 2nd PC that is identical hardware, no problems with that PC.

 

[whs]

Oh man, that really gets to me. Here is someone who apparently wanted to protect his data and system - but chose the wrong approach. The Raid mirror protects you against one event, and one event only - the rare case where a HDD physically fails. But in all the other 999 possible system and hardware failures (also power), it does nothing for you.

I would have put the OS on a small seperate disk (possibly a 60 to 90GB SSD for super performance) and all the data on the Raid mirror. Then I would image the system every morning at boot-up (can be scheduled automatically and runs a for few minutes in the background) to an external disk and image the data from time to time. Thus you can at least get the system up and running in no time and the data is triple protected.

But now, with the power failure, you really have no clue what happened and since the system cannot be activated it will be very difficult to diagnose and fix the problem.

 

[rick619]

Oh man, that really gets to me. Here is someone who apparently wanted to protect his data and system - but chose the wrong approach. The Raid mirror protects you against one event, and one event only - the rare case where a HDD physically fails. But in all the other 999 possible system and hardware failures (also power), it does nothing for you.

I would have put the OS on a small seperate disk (possibly a 60 to 90GB SSD for super performance) and all the data on the Raid mirror. Then I would image the system every morning at boot-up (can be scheduled automatically and runs a for few minutes in the background) to an external disk and image the data from time to time. Thus you can at least get the system up and running in no time and the data is triple protected.

But now, with the power failure, you really have no clue what happened and since the system cannot be activated it will be very difficult to diagnose and fix the problem.

Yeah, the original quote for the systems included solid state drives, he chose not to get them...

I like the idea of imaging automatically.

 

[rick619]

So I saw a fix in another post:
http://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-debugging/27414-blank-screen-cursor-but-no-lo g-screen.html

I did the part about setting permissions.

It didn't seem to work at first (still got the black screen), so I left it for a few hours.
I came back, and it was booted into windows! So I did the permissions again,
this time I got access denied errors on MANY files. Most programs seemed to
be working, but some were not (Office, photshop to name a few). So I just
started the repair install using 'upgrade', will let that run.

Any suggestions for when that completes (assuming it does complete of course) :sarc:

 

[whs]

Good, you are making progress, The repair install timing depends on too many H/W and S/W factors - hard to predict. But if it runs longer than 1 hour, I would check.

Too bad they did not go with the SSDs. But you have to get that OS off the Raid and away from the data - even if you put a small HDD in (which will of course be a lot slower than an SSD). Here is one I would pick (I have 3 of those): Newegg.com - OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD2-2VTXE60G 2.5" 60GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

 

[rick619]

Yeah! The repair install seems to have worked. Looks like Norton is the only thing that will need to be reinstalled.

I'll work on getting him to upgrade to the SSD. For now need to make sure he replaces that UPS.

 

[whs]

Congratulations. Very good. Explain to your customer that he needs to be prepared for all kinds of trouble and not only for a disk failure (therefore images). And seperating the data from the OS is precaution 101. The system on an SSD will, of course, give this system a completely different rythm - fast, fast, fast

 

[missingno]

Hey, I have a similar issue. I'm trying to service a computer that is running 7 32-bit Home Premium that when I attempt to boot into the OS on the hard disk, it only gives me a black screen and a cursor. No login screen, or anything else. So I figured "I'll just boot into safe mode and fix it". Same problem. I tried using the repair utility, same problem.

I started to think this was the result of corrupted System files, so I tried to boot from an optical disk to try and repair the OS. Here is where it gets weird: the same problem (black screen and only a cursor) occurred when booting from an optical disk! I now think that it's a hardware problem, as I know that this CD works.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[rick619]

Hey, I have a similar issue. I'm trying to service a computer that is running 7 32-bit Home Premium that when I attempt to boot into the OS on the hard disk, it only gives me a black screen and a cursor. No login screen, or anything else. So I figured "I'll just boot into safe mode and fix it". Same problem. I tried using the repair utility, same problem.

I started to think this was the result of corrupted System files, so I tried to boot from an optical disk to try and repair the OS. Here is where it gets weird: the same problem (black screen and only a cursor) occurred when booting from an optical disk! I now think that it's a hardware problem, as I know that this CD works.

Anyone have any ideas?

Checkout this thread:
http://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-debugging/27414-blank-screen-cursor-but-no-log-screen.html

I was able to fix it by taking the HD out, putting it as a slave on a 2nd PC. Then Reset all the permissions on the drive.

After that, it was still not working right, but would actually boot after I let it sit at the black screen for a few hours. At that point, I was able to do the repair install.