Windows 7 machines booting to blank screen this evening

M

Moosh

Gawd
Joined
Dec 10, 2000
Messages
802
Hello,

I have two Windows 7 machines which are booting to a blank screen this evening. One is my desktop (custom AMD build in my signature) and one is my laptop (Samsung AMD). My desktop is duel booted with Xubuntu and that works fine. When I login to the desktop machine it goes to a blank screen with a mouse pointer that never goes way. The laptop shows a Windows desktop update window for like 10 minutes then it goes to a blank screen that never goes away (waited 30 minutes so far). I was able to login to the laptop using a different account but the main one has this issue as does the main account on my desktop. I am wondering if a windows update caused this? Has anyone ever seen this happen?
 
A windows update is probably unhappy. Try doing last good known or safe mode. You can also try booting to windows repair and load system restore and going back to before it did the update. And yes it was probably an update. But that doesn't mean its at fault.
 
After about 45 minutes the laptop booted up so it finished whatever it was stuck on. Going to leave the desktop on over night. Thanks.
 
This week's Patch Tuesday did include a patch to update .NET Framework to 4.5.2. Patching .NET Framework is notorious for taking a long time:

"Updates to the .NET Framework 4 require a complete regeneration of the Native Image Cache, a very time-consuming operation. For some computers, an interaction with previously installed Native Images may cause Native Image regeneration to take much longer than expected. Although this issue only affects setup times, the effect can be several minutes to tens of minutes. Computers that have more Native Images installed will see longer generation times."

Not that I have any idea what a Native Image is.
 
I had a similar sounding issue.
I bought an AMD 290 and started suffering black screen issues when running programs and after some time it started happening on boot as well.
For a while I managed to reboot a few times and get into Windows, but a bit later I could no longer get into Windows and was always met with a black screen as the desktop was supposed to load.
When the black screen occurred, there was no hard disk activity so Windows was no longer running.

Booting into safe mode, I disabled the gfx card in device manager and was able to boot Windows normally.
I enabled the gfx card in device manager, uninstalled the gfx card driver and rebooted back into Windows. The gfx card was detected and requested a reboot.
I tried the whole process a few times either rebooting or installing a gfx driver at this stage, but each time, the next boot resulted in a black screen again.
I tried using DDU to remove all traces of the driver but got exactly the same result once a driver was installed again.
I had to re-install Windows to get back normal operation.


OP, boot in safe mode and disable the gfx card in device manager, see if that lets you then boot into Windows normally again.
If it ends up being terminal for your current Windows install like it was for me, at least you can get access to how you have set up your OS / Browser etc and save off a few things.
 
Nenu, thanks for the idea but the problem went away on its own. Evidence suggests it was a windows update issue.
 
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