W7 64 bit black screen of death without cursor

[rocks911]

This is entirely my fault and I should be slapped for being so dumb, but I got impatient with a [COLOR=blue !important][COLOR=blue !important]flash [COLOR=blue !important]drive[/COLOR][/COLOR][/COLOR] that hangs. I have a Rosewill USB 3.0 card installed on the W7 64 bit PC and have a USB hub run from the card.
I was transferring a video to a PNY 32Gb flash drive inserted into the hub and it was taking forever, the time remaining indicated 3 hours...well I was hoping to do the transfer quickly as I needed to get to work...as no progress was being made I clicked on cancel and it hung there for a while and finally I just pulled the stick from the hub.
That might have been a bad mistake because the screen immediately went black and rebooting brought me around to the same black screen. Nothing comes up, I mean nothing, no blinking cursor, nothing. The [COLOR=blue !important][COLOR=blue !important]PC[/COLOR][/COLOR] is running when I reboot but there is nothing on the screen.
Is there a way into the OS other than an old rescue disk I have?

 

[rocks911]

So I figured the worst that would happen is that I would corrupt the data on the thumb drive which wouldnt be a big deal, but nope the screen immediately went completely blank and a reboot gave the same result.

Any ideas?

 

[rocks911]

So I'm back home working on this mess and I can't figure out what's up. My desktop display is looking for a signal and not finding it. I have switched between the video card and the onboard video but no signal is getting to the monitor, it just displays "check signal cable".i ran an hdmi cable from the video card to my tv but there's nothing coming across.
I just don't get what this is all about, pull a USB flash drive after canceling a transfer and immediately upon removal the screen goes blank and nothing thus far has helped.
The pc powers up and makes all the right noises for lack of a better description, but no signal. I put a recovery disk in the DVD drive and it doesn't spin up.
I don't know what my next move is, any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[bassfisher6522]

Can you get into safe mode? Can you get into your BIOS? You can try rebooting and tapping the F8 key until you get to the "windows advanced options menu" and use last known good configuration.

Using Last Known Good Configuration

Advanced startup options (including safe mode)

 

[rocks911]

No I can't get anything to display.
My monitor is not receiving a signal. I have switched the monitor cable between the video card and the onboard video and no signal is getting through. I even ran an hdmi cable from the video card to my television and...nothing.
The monitor appears to be working as a "check signal cable" message scrolls across the screen.
I just can't believe that pulling a USB flash drive can so thoroughly crash my pc.

 

[rocks911]

So I pulled the power cord from my tower and took the dogs for a walk, came back plugged it in with my W7 recovery disk in the drive, and I'm currently in safe mode.

I have arrived at a "system recovery options" screen, I selected "system restore" and I got a pop up message indicating "to use system restore, you must specify which windows installation to restore. Restart this computer, select an operating system, and then select system restore".

So apparently it can't see my OS?

I'm nervous about doing anything further...

What is recommended?

 

[Lovus]

Back up your data and do a Clean Install

 

[Kaktussoft]

First your pc wasn't doing anything at all!! Just disconnecting the power cord fixed that?
Be patient I tell you what to do. Since problem has changed from displaying nothing... what happens now if you try to boot normally?

 

[Kaktussoft]

In win7 recovery environment->command prompt:

diskpart
list disk
[COLOR=red]how many disks?[/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]sel disk 0[/COLOR]
[COLOR=#000000]list part[/COLOR]
[COLOR=#000000]list vol[/COLOR]

How many partitions? Which volumes? Which drive letter is win7 (chekc the size)? Drive letter can be different, so it's not necessary C!

 

[rocks911]

So I've worked my way through "system repair" then "system restore"and it's currently "restoring files"...fingers crossed.

 

[Kaktussoft]

So I've worked my way through "system repair" then "system restore"and it's currently "restoring files"...fingers crossed.

System restore isn't possible if recovery environment doesn't list win7 as you told before!! Did startup repair fix that problem? why doing a system restore?

 

[rocks911]

I'm in Bios, and the boot drive is specified as cd-rom which clearly is a problem, so I forget, should I select hdd group or network boot group?

The "system restore" indicated that it was successful, booted again and I pressed f10 to get to bios to have it boot correctly...so which do I choose....he'd group or network boot group?

Sorry that I got ahead of the replies, clearly I'm an impatient guy...I'll await further instructions...

 

[rocks911]

Yeah I couldn't await further instructions...darn ADHD!
I'm back in to the W7 OS!

Kaktussoft, that is exactly correct, after unplugging the tower and waiting 15 minutes, plugging it back in and powering up I got something to display. It loaded the W7 repair disk and it brought me around to several options...system restore, system repair, and a few other options...after the other options brought me to a dead end, because my OS was not being seen, I finally chose "system repair" which was successful and brout me straight to system restore, then I rebooted into BIOS and changed the boot disk as the wrong disk was selected, then rebooted into my normal W7 OS with a message that "system restore was successful"...my system has been restored to 2 days ago.

So what is recommended to be sure that everything is good?
Maybe scan disk for errors?

 

[Kaktussoft]

do a scandisk and a memory test as well. Don't know what solved the problem. But first post C:\Windows\System32\LogFiles\Srt\SrtTrail.txt

 

[rocks911]

Attached the SrtTrail.txt file in wordpad

I hope it makes sense to you, I dont know what to think of the information in the file, it indicates "Last successful boot time: ‎10/‎14/‎2011 8:26:00 AM (GMT)
Number of repair attempts: 1"...huh?

 

[Kaktussoft]

Because win7 wasn't listed in the list in recovery environment... startup repair didn't know where win7 was. So it couldn't make the srttrail.txt file on that volume. At least that's what I think. But now I don't know what it did test and what was fixed! Next time click "view diagnostics details". Without failure info and fix... I don't know what happened.

 

[rocks911]

I looked at event viewer and got the following:
Windows Kernel event ID 41 error "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first" in Windows 7

Why it did so I dont know, other than pulling out the USB flash drive while it was...cancelling...or whatever it was doing, it was just stuck and didnt seem to be responding. I think the PNY flash drive just doesnt get along with the OS, though I must say a lot of the flash drives I use seem to jamb up the system. I think I need to pay attention to the brand that works best.

Does anybody have any experience with flash drives freezing up the OS or crashing the PC? This PNY 32 Gb I have really gives me problems.

 

[rocks911]

The craziest result of the crash was that the file size indication of a couple of my 2Tb drives is crazy. I have 2 internal Barracuda 2Tb drives that has various media on them. Filoes that I know are, say, 200Mb show 200Kb instead. The whole drive size shows correctly but individual files within the drive show Kb when they should show Mb...whats that all about?
Everything is working so far, the file size thing is crazy.