Black Screen of Death, Cant Boot

[venomshot]

Hey All,

Ive been searching on the net since Friday and found a variety of "solutions", but none of them have worked... Here's my issue:

Back when it was released, I installed Windows 8 preview on a new partition of my Windows 7 laptop. Ive been switching back and forth no problem, but about a month ago when trying to log in, I typed in my password and was stuck at the black screen with a cursor. After a few restarts and startup repairs it sorted itself out.

Now, it's happened again, but this time, startup repair isn't doing the trick. It reports no OS found in the error.

I am dual booting between 7 and 8, and in trying to login to 7, typing my password, it again brings me to the black screen with a cursor. I cannot press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reach the task manager and manually start explorer.exe, and same thing happens in safe mode.

I have checked my C drive and saw there were backups of my explorer.exe, so I tried to switch them up with the current one. At one point, I could get to my desktop and see all of my taskbar icons, however hovering over the taskbar would show a loading cursor and I could not open anything. Restarting again brought me back to the black screen.

I have tried fixboot, fixmbr, BCD editor, etc, to no avail. I have also tried "last known good configuration", system restore (which reports no restore points...) and checking the registry to verify explorer.exe is the only listing in the Shell file.

Also, virus scan MBAM and others: No viruses.

Errors: At one point with the black screen, I let it sit, and a few errors came up after an hour or so... dwm.exe unable to start correctly error 0xc000185, explorer.exe unable to start correctly error 0xc000185, then when pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del, "Failure to display security and shut down options". In viewing one of the error details, it reported problem event name InPageCoFire, damaged file name propsys.dll. I replaced that file and a clean one and no change.

Right now I am using Windows 8 boot. I can see all of my files are still in the Windows 7 partition.

Does anyone have any more ideas?

 

[venomshot]

bump.......

 

[crisan_tiberiu]

you might have a connection issue with your hard drive. Check your cable, clean them and replug them into your HD and mobo, try to switch the sata ports aswell

 

[venomshot]

If it were a connection issue causing issues in W7, Would that mean that I should also be having a problem being on Windows 8 partition on the same hard drive?

 

[gamerk316]

Interesting...

0xC0000185: STATUS_IO_DEVICE_ERROR

The I/O device reported an I/O error.

So looks like a HW problem at first glance.

Short term, open a command prompt and run 'sfc /scannow' to check for damaged dll's.

 

[venomshot]

Interesting...

0xC0000185: STATUS_IO_DEVICE_ERROR

The I/O device reported an I/O error.

So looks like a HW problem at first glance.

Short term, open a command prompt and run 'sfc /scannow' to check for damaged dll's.

Hi gamerk316,

I actually did run sfc /scannow on the disk and it reports no OS found. However when I boot into Windows 8, I do see all of the Windows 7 files are still there. I can also boot into W7 and see my user profiles, but signing in leads me to the black screen. I hope this info might help.

Thanks.

 

[venomshot]

Bump, anyone have any other ideas?

 

[blakwidowrsa]

I would suggest taking the disk out and hot-plugging it into another win7 PC. Copy everything off that you want/need and reinsert the disk in your pc. And newly install win 7 by removing ALL partitions with Disk Options during win7 disk selection install.

Windows 8 Developer Preview will only work for a limited time.Maybe you reached the end of the trial.

You probably installed Win8 after/ onto the win7 partitiion to dual-boot. That means win8 wrote a new bootmgr over win7's.
Remove all partitions and do a fresh install.

 

[venomshot]

Best answer selected by venomshot.