Vista - Vista stuck on black screen with mouse after boot progress bar

Hello,

I upgraded my Vista system drive using Seagate's DiscWizard tool to clone
my old system drive. Everything when ok. Vista was able to boot and re-boot
with no issues. After seeing that everything was fine I used the old system
drive to replace a failing drive on another system (which was the reason
I bought a new drive in the first place).

Because it was a new drive (Seagate 1.5 TB) I decided to run a chkdsk (/f
/r) to make sure everything was ok. The chkdsk took forever so that I left
it running overnight. When I saw the system the next day it was stuck in
a black screen with the mouse functional. I rebooted the machine with the
reset button (ctrl-alt-del will not do it) and the system failed to reboot
(no boot manager error). With my Vista DVD I did the startup repair and
then it staterd to re-boot normally. After the bios screens I got the small
green progress bar as usual and the the screen turned black and changed resolution
(as usual). After a while the mouse pointer will appear and then all HDD
activity would stop (just a flash every 10 or 20 seconds with no clear pattern).
I lefted several hours and the black screen with the fuctional mouse pointer
stayed the same. Ctrl-alt-del or alt-tab would not do anything.

I tried to re-boot it several times and I got the same results. Booting
in safe mode will do the same but staying in low resolution. The startup
repair said that everything was ok. I ran chkdsk /f /r and it reported 13
bad sector on free clusters. Yes, I will have to exchange the drive. But
before that I would like to reboot my Vista install and make it functional
so that I can put it on a new drive. A clean install is my last option because
I don't have the time to setup my system from scratch (yes, I know I should
have backed-up the whole system if it was so important. But to my defense
I am waiting for the new versions of WHS system so that I can backup my systems.)
My user data is safe and backed-up.

I tried all the startup modes with no diferent results: safe modes, low resolution,
debug, disabling signature checking, last know configuration, etc. The boot
log showed that the last driver to load was the nvoclock.sys (NVidia utility)
so that I think it could be video-driver related. I renamed the driver and
rebooted with the same results. System restore reports no restore points.
I know I had restore points before.

Serching the net gives many other people with the same issue. Some of them
said it is a video driver issue, others said that it is a virtual drive driver,
etc. (http://forums.techarena.in/vista-help/747332.htm, http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/...5226&SiteID=17).

I wanted to do an install-upgrade of Vista but I can't do that booting from
the DVD (I have the Vista DVD with SP1) because the option is grayed out
with a message saying that I need to run the Setup from witihn Vista to do
the upgrade.

I also tried the System File Checker (SFC) but it does not run from the Recovery
Command Prompt. Error is "Windows Resource Protection could not start the
repair service".

Concrete questions:

1. Is there a way to run the SFC from the Recovery Command Prompt? Could
this fix my issue. Or,

2. can I do/force/hack a install-upgrade booting from the Vista DVD. Or,

3. can I uninstall/disable the NVidia video driver from the Recovery Command
Prompt so that the system uses the default video driver? Or,

4. I read a comment about doing a parallel Vista installation. Could that
help me to recover the current install? Or,

5. any ideas you can think of?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Regards,
Patricio.

Hi Patricio,

If you have another graphic card or onboard try them, if not you could try removing and replacing your card.
If this doesnt work...................? reinstall?


Pooch

Looks and sounds like HD failure

--
Peter

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"Patricio" <Patricio@xxxxxx> wrote in message news:e572e5df140618cb1d044b124c75@xxxxxx

Yes, that's looks like the culprit. I just hope I can save me the hours
needed to setup my system again.

Regards,
Patricio.

"Peter Foldes" wrote: