Window 7 Black Screen W/White Cursor (help)

[Dean]

Hi Everyone,
I have a perplexing problem. I have had 2 machines come into my shop this week with the following problem. Boot seems normal until window splash screen appears. Windows 7 splash screen appears and hangs for a while, (a little longer than normal 2-3 min) then when desktop should load or boot process turns over to operating system the screen goes completely black with a white movable cursor of correct graphics value. (Size). There is no Ctrl-Alt-Del, non-functional (nothing happens), Safe-Mode does the exact same scenario. I have tried all options in safe mode, e.g.: safe mode, last know good configuration, debug, etc. all with the same scenario. I have gone through the repair start up with no results, (not that there ever is) I have used a boot disk to run bootrec /rebuildbcd, bootrec /fixboot, chkdsk /r numerous times with no results. Chkdsk /r should be noted that it scans very fast with no errors. I have checked the dir of c:/ and all data is intact.
I have also mounted the drive with Ubuntu, deleted pending xml update files, updates, and cleaned all temp files, all with no avail. I mounted the drive with Fabs and backed up all data, and used the recovery partition to recover windows which runs beautiful afterwards. I have scanned the drives and backup with Norton, SAS, Malwarebytes etc with nothing really found.
Has anyone run across this issue..???? Please post back if you have run across this; Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Dean,
Deans Computer Services
A+Cert

 

[mikeroq]

Have you ran diagnostics on the memory and hard drive? Also have you tried to re-seat the ram?

Have you tried using system restore?

 

[seedubya]

We had one last week. No idea what caused it. No evidence of infection. Ran out of time to troubleshoot and wiped. No problems afterwards.

 

[YOCS]

I haven't run across this but it sounds like explorer is hanging. Can you bring up task manager Ctrl>Shift>Esc then run explorer.exe

 

[alluseridsrejected]

Black screen of death can be frustrating, but I have found the most common issue is to do with video drivers. Have you tryed updating the video driver?

 

[Trek PC Computers]

We have had few computers come in with this issue and the way we fixed them was taking the hard drive out and put it into our system and run chkdsk /r /f and plug it back in and thats worked for us each and every single time if its not the video driver issue.

 

[Dean]

Have you ran diagnostics on the memory and hard drive? Also have you tried to re-seat the ram?

Have you tried using system restore?

Memory fine, reseated ram, No system restore points, System also run Ubuntu just fine. Harddrive was also perfectly accessable with Ubuntu.

 

[Dean]

Yes, thats what I landed up doing after playing with it for about 3-4 hours

 

[Dean]

I also did that but I did not run chkdsk /r /f only the /r. The chkdsk also run very fast with no errors found.

 

[Dean]

There is no acess at all with Ctrl-alt-del

 

[seedubya]

I also did that but I did not run chkdsk /r /f only the /r. The chkdsk also run very fast with no errors found.

chkdsk /r implies /f so no difference

see here

 

[Dean]

No key combinations will work. Screen just stays black with the white cursor.

 

[Dean]

Thks, thats what I thought.

 

[Dean]

No Safe mode, no way to update, or restore to an earlier time as restore points seem to vanish

 

[The Silent Hobo]

Have you tried an in place repair off the windows 7 cd and seeing if that fixes it? or maybe getting a good copy of explorer.exe and backing up the old one and replacing it with that through the command prompt?

 

[ShinyTech]

These issue are normally caused by viruses or corruption from windows updates. 90% of the time the only thing you can do is backup their stuff, run a hardware test, then reformatt back to factory.

 

[kevinjhaag]

These issue are normally caused by viruses or corruption from windows updates. 90% of the time the only thing you can do is backup their stuff, run a hardware test, then reformatt back to factory.

Ouch! Reformat. I'd only do a N&P as a last resort or if time is an issue to get it fixed.
Since a few things can cause this problem its hard to say. By the sounds of it, I still think you have a mbr issue even thou you tried a number of things. I have tried them myself and one thing I didn't notice and the commands didn't change for some reason and its something as simple as making a partition the active one. But it has not been always this but some other boot issue. I use a custom made ubcd that I use to test various boot options like booting off first partition, or boot windows partition, etc.. If I get it to boot with one of the options then I know I have a mbr or partition problem.

But if you have spent to much time on this already then I would go the N&P option because you know that will work for sure. Well Good Luck my friend.

Kevin

 

[Dean]

Hey Kevin,
you know you might have something here. I believe it was something with the MBR. I did run bootrec /rebuildbcd, etc. I did not pull the drive and run it in Acronis to set the MBR as active. If I get another i will give that a try forsure. Thks,
Dean

 

[PCX]

Memory fine, reseated ram, No system restore points, System also run Ubuntu just fine. Harddrive was also perfectly accessable with Ubuntu.

You are not very clear on what you did for a diagnostic . . .

Re-seating the memory does not ensure that it works fine. What did you test the memory with and for how long?

Also, Linux can access failing hard drives all day long just fine. Just because it can be accessed does not mean that the hard drive is not failing. So what hard drive diagnostic tests have you actually run? What were you using to run those tests?

What other diagnostic tests have you performed? Remember, a live Linux CD wont tell you everything.

 

[Metanis]

Extortion-ware attempt

I'm not sure if this pertains to your Win7 problem however...

I have encountered this twice. In both cases the partition table was damaged. The 2nd time I saw this I spent some time researching and found that an entry for an inactive OS/2 boot partition had been created in the partition table.

Since this was an XPPro box I booted from the XPPro CD and simply deleted the false entry for the OS/2 partition and this allowed the machine to boot normally from the C: drive again.

The XP system was damaged but standard virus clean-up/fix-up recovered it.

I think some combination of extortion-ware in conjunction with the Microsoft monthly malicious software removal scan caused this to occur because the problem appeared during the reboot after October's patch load installed early that morning.