Black Screen of Near Death?

magritte

New Member
I'm finding more and more that when I boot my computer or reboot my computer after the initial Vista logo (with the status bar at the bottom of the screen) I get just a black screen on both my monitors with a fully functional white cursor. Unfortunately, I can't do anything with that cursor and the computer doesn't seem to respond to any other input: ctrl-alt-del won't bring up task manager, pressing the power button on my tower won't initiate a shutdown, etc. The only thing I can do is move the cursor around with my mouse. The harddrive light seems to go off and on for a while and eventually stops, but nothing else happens, even if I leave the computer for a few hours.

The only way out is to hit the rest button. After that, I'll get the "windows did not shut down properly" screen asking me if I want to go into safe mode or start windows normally. If I start windows normally, it boots just fine. I think there are a couple of Windows shut down unexpectedly warnings in the event log but nothing else of relevance.

I did install SP1 but can't recall if this started with SP1 or may have happened a couple of times before. Now it seems to be happening pretty much every time I start the computer.

I did find the following the SP1 release notes that largely describes my problem:

Display

In some cases, computers that use multiple monitors may display black screens when the display mode is changed after resuming from sleep. This issue can also affect laptop computers connected to an external monitor. Display mode changes may occur in any of the following circumstances:
  • Attaching or detaching a monitor.
  • Accessing the computer remotely.
  • Changing the screen resolution or color depth using the Display Properties dialog box (which you can access in Control Panel) or an application.
  • Logging users on or off.
  • Rotating the display on a tablet computer.
To avoid this, do not use multiple monitors, or do not allow the computer to sleep or change the display mode.
If this has already occurred, restart the computer.

However, this specifically talks about coming back from sleep, which is not the case with me. In my case it happens when I initially boot or when I reboot the system. My power settings never go to sleep. However, my UPS is set to put the system into hibernation if there's an extended power out. I haven't tested a forced hibernation, but if it were to return to the black screen that could be a major issue as there would be no opportunity to save any open files since the only action available is a hard reset.

I also find Microsoft's solution rather insulting: don't use multiple monitors... Isn't the point of SP1 to fix this sort of nuisance?

In any case, are there any gurus who have any idea what might be going on here and if I can fix it?

If it helps, I had an ATI Radeon 2600XT but it kept causing "Display was not responding and was reset" errors, which sometimes would lead to a BSOD. Since I saw no evidence that AMD was going to release a fix in the near future (if ever) I decided to try nVidia instead. So I just replace that card with a nVidia 9600GT. The black screen issue does seem worst since I swapped the cards but I don't know if that's just a coincidence or not. It was happening intermittently with the ATI card as well. I found with the nVidia card I couldn't boot successfully as it seemed to fail to load the default VGA driver. Only when I hit F8 and chose the 640x480 was I able to successfully boot and from there I was able to install the nVidia driver. So far I'm not having any other issues except for the black screen thing.

Thanks!
 

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