I have a stumper for you!

[Terryl]

OK here is the deal,

A good freind called and said his ne laptop won't come up, I said give my 20 and I will be right over.

It is stuck in a black screen with the cursor, you can move the mouse and it will move but nothing else works.

Re-started it, (Power down) and it goes through post, then it says "resuming windows", screen goes dark and it's back to the "Black Screen of Death?" it there is a thing like that.

It's a 1 year old Dell Insperon laptop, running W7 home, 64 bit.

It will not let me into safe mode, but I can get into BIOS, and run the tests in BIOS, but in no way can I get past the "Resuming windows" junk..


Any Ideas anyone????

[Nostradamus]

you never said whether you can get to safe mode or not. Try rebooting and hold F8 when the menu pops up first select last known good configuration and if that doesn't resolve it then reboot again holding F8 and select safe mode. from there then you should be able to do a virus scan or a system restore

[DualTest]

I know what you mean. Is it hardware failure or software. If it was hardware it would show at BIOS boot. If it was sotware it would show up at OS boot. And since bios is not reporting problems I am looking in Bill Gates direction. I am sure that you got shot down on the format and lose everything option. But it really is the only option at this point IMO

[Nostradamus]

ok my bad, I never seen last sentence. looks like you might need to do a system reinstall using his recovery disks but I ran across the same thing the other day and it was an easy fix. A customer went and left a DVD in the drive and it was trying to boot off of that. Just for the record that was a dell as well

[mechanicman]

make sure you have all usb/ devices unplugged and then try reboot? take out batterry and reinstall and turn on..

[JCO]

Hey Terryl I hope your not at the persuade it with a 20 LB sledge hammer step yet...LOL

[Nostradamus]

Hey Terryl I hope your not at the persuade it with a 20 LB sledge hammer step yet...LOL

it is a laptop, a 5lb hammer will suffice

[Terryl]

Well it's not mine to do the 40 story drop test on, but its still running the deep hard drive tests, all other hardware has passed the test, next 1 to 2 hrs will tell if the hard drive is foo foo.

In my next step it's remove the hard drive and see if I can to a chkdsk on it via my test PC.

I have more fun with my .44 test.

[pcman888]

I always have a win 7 boot able dvd .Go in cmos set it to boot from dvd,then it will come up to options menu and try to recover the hard dive.Sounds like all the hardware is good and it can't access the root drive .Laptop hardrives fail way more than than the bigger ones and can just go bad and it almost new .the dvd should tell you if the drive is bad.

[mclovin]

Is it possible that the screen is shot,try plugging it into another lap top and see if that screen shows?
I just replaced my screen a while back but mine is about 5 years old...

[seawulf71]

I had one do this to me a few months ago. It was installing windows updates but didn't tell me... I think it was previously interrupted during updates. I let it sit there for 2+ hours and it eventually finished up and booted into windows.

[Priestmill]

HDD, is most likely the problem.

In the meantime check for loose RAM or CPU.

Well it's not mine to do the 40 story drop test on, but its still running the deep hard drive tests, all other hardware has passed the test, next 1 to 2 hrs will tell if the hard drive is foo foo.

In my next step it's remove the hard drive and see if I can to a chkdsk on it via my test PC.

I have more fun with my .44 test.

[timster]

get a Windows disc and run a repair.

[abouttosnap]

Possible keyboard problem?

[Terryl]

OK too all:

This problem prevents any form of troubleshooting via the laptop or PC as it locks up in one state and wont let you go anyfurther, booting to a CD or DVD drive does nothing, it just sits there looking at you will a blank screen.


Now how I did manage to get it fixed and without a re-install or loss of data on the hard drive, was.

I remover the suspected hard drive and installed it on my SATA/IDE hard drive to USB interface, then using my laptop as a test bed, I was able to do a CHKDSK on that drive, it found and fixed the problems, after I was able to read the disk I ran some hard drive tests with another program and fixed some bad sectors, it also recovered and fixed the data in those sectors.

Re-installed the drive and it booted and came up and ran great.

What I think happened is she down loaded an update for her Garmin, (last thing downloaded and run before the crash) it hiccuped and caused a problem on the drive that it could not recover from, I removed and re-installed that update, things work fine now.


And if you all do this type of stuff for a living, I recommend to all to get one of these external drive USB interfaces, they can save a lot of time and data when working on a funky drive.

It can also be used to transfer data to a new drive when doing a hard drive replacement or upgrade.

Thanks to all that replied,

Terryl