No windows loading screen - stuck on black screen

[Hack&Lube]

Okay, I usually know what I am doing with computers but this is freaking me out because I had just spend a week doing a lot of things to my current install of windows to make me like it and I have a lot of registry tweaks and installed programs and I don't want to be faced with a format.

Tonight I was at a LAN party and playing Battlefield 2, my computer crashed and refused to boot into windows again. In my past experience, I would have had some sort of helpful error message like that my hal.dll is corrupted or the HDD is not detected etc. But now I cannot even boot into safe mode or safe mode with a commmand prompt. The usual list of items loading doesn't even appear. It is just a black screen after the usual bios bootup. I have reset and played with my bios already, it's not that.

I know my hardware is fine because I luckily have a year old (and so useless as none of my stuff is there but it is a proper version of windows with most of the drivers for all my hardware) backup of this windows install on the boot partition of an external drive which I hooked up via E-sata and fooled the computer into booting off of. I am currently running this and doing a windows check disc of the actual harddrive which will not boot into windows.

I don't know what to do at this point. I don't want to do a windows repair from the recovery console because in my experience, it fixes windows but resets many things back to stock windows and I'll lose a lot of my settings, registry edits, customized GUI, etc. What can I do? I figure that something is corrupted on that harddrive that is hanging when windows tries to load but I don't know what. In the past, it would tell me (like hal.dll) and I could replace that one file with a backed up one but now I don't know what to change or to do.

Thanks

[ricosuave]

The only thing I would suggest is pull everything from the mobo except a bare minimum and see if that will boot, then add each component back in, restarting in between...

Also, check to make sure everything is seated tightly - maybe transport to the LAN loosened something?

[Rathji]

Since it is POSTing and your other drive seems to work, I am guessing it is a HDD issue. Try booting Ubuntu from a CD ( LiveCD ) and if that works that would make it even more likely.

If it does seem to be the problem and you cannot detect any loose connections, and the drive won't work in another computer, the platter might have physically shifted in transport or your computer was bumped during the LAN party.

The best way I know to (cheaply) remedy this is to take your HDD out and put it in the freezer. This contracts the metal and could reseat the platter properly. If you do decide to do this, look up tips online, but you need to seal the drive in a airtight bag with some of those silicon packets that come in shoes, to absorb moisture to avoid condensation ruining your drive.

[showtime]

Im actually having the exact same problem right now. I tried formatting the drive and same problem. But i didnt try putting it on a different hard drive i'll try that next.

[Bobblehead]

Could you be bitten by the Seagate firmware bug?

[Cliche]

Is the file system of the non-posting drive accessible? Have you tried a FIXMBR? If it's just a black screen after BIOS post, then bad startup block/initial sector might be the problem.

[Buff]

Showtime, did you see a the post screen? Is the light on your monitor amber, or green/yellow? If the former, then ignore the latter. If the latter then either your monitor or video card are malfunctioning.

To both Showtime and Hack&Lube How about beeps? Any abnormal beeps? If so please describe the beeps. (ie. how many long beeps, and how many short beeps and in what succession they occur).

[Hack&Lube]

Yeah, that night I opened recovery console and did a chkdsk /r and then fixmbr. I was really freaked out. Somehow BF2 crashing corrupted my entire master boot record.

[showtime]

After formatting all the drive i tried installing it on one of my other hard drive and everything worked perfectly. After looking into it, my one hard drive is the segate model thats having problems...


On related computer problems; When windows loads up and goes it the main screen it flashes then goes black again, but once I terminate explorer.exe and restart it everything goes back to normal.

[Cliche]

Run a memory check? Corrupt explorer.exe on first boot up, or strange errors may indicate faulty ram, or wrong ram timings. (If it really were a corrupt explorer.exe, then it would still give an error when restarting it)

The only other suggestion would be if the symptom appears in safe mode. If it doesnt, then something that's being loaded with explorer.exe is generating errors and explorer doesn't know how to deal with it. If it is video, then if you look in the event viewer there would be something about your display driver generating errors.