If in both normal boot and Safe Mode you see just a black screen with mouse pointer you can try several things to resolve the issue.
For me all was well until I ran through a series of reboots for Windows Updates and my Windows 7 64 bit Professional PC had a problem with one. I have seen this problem before and this time I tried everything listed below but in the end the fix for me was to CHECKDISK with repair switches (/F /R) the drive as detailed in number 5 below:
- Unplug EVERYTHING you can from the machine: printers, wireless NIC’s… and try to boot up
. - Try LAST KNOWN GOOD in the F8 boot menu.
. - press the left SHIFT key 5 times quickly. This should load the STICKY KEYS, EASE OF USE tool and will tell you if your operating system is responding at all.
. - press CONTROL + ALT + DEL, bring up a TASK MANAGER, END TASK on EXPLORER.EXE if it is in the PROCESS LIST, then click FILE, RUN and type EXPLORER.EXE . Perhaps Explorer has just crashed and you need restart it.
. - Get your PC / Laptop into REPAIR mode (one way to do this is to boot from the Windows DVD, and choose the small REPAIR link at the bottom left), then bring up a COMMAND PROMPT and run CHKDSK D:\ /F /R (note that in my case D:\ was the drive letter for my primary partition when booted from the DVD).
. - Get your PC / Laptop into REPAIR mode and try to restore to a PREVIOUS VERSION.
UPDATE: It turns out that the hard drive is bad according to Seagates SEATOOLS and so I used EASUS TODO BACK UP to clone (ghost) the disk onto a new disk and now all is well. The CHKDSK was at least good enough to get my Windows operational so I could easily clone it.
6 Comments
danredge · September 25, 2021 at 11:59 am
For me the problem was the resolution of the screen. (The VM had automatically changed for an unknow reason. I have force the Resolution to be the same as my host and then everything was working perfectly 🙂 Hope it help someone else.
Idrees · January 14, 2015 at 2:32 am
What a sloution dude. You saved me getting my ass kicked
bakemeacake · July 8, 2014 at 2:09 pm
You didn’t solve anything.
This is just a workaround to a Microsoft bug they do not appear to be able to fix.
The permanent fix appears to be switch to Linux or buy a MAC.
Ian Matthews · July 30, 2014 at 9:00 pm
Correct, this is a work around, but changing Operating Systems is hardly practical.
Charlie · June 16, 2014 at 8:20 am
My computer wasn’t responding at all to ctrl alt delete, but your suggestion to try stickykeys by pressing shift a bunch did help.
1. press shift a bunch
2. go to control panel from dialogue box
3. search to open task manager
4. run new process
5. enter explorer and press enter
Mark Judge · January 3, 2013 at 2:39 am
I had similar issue on windows 7 which only happened when my laptop was connected to the domain. It turned out to be because my windows password had expired. Resetting the password resolved the issue.