Black Screen of Death (KSOD)

[EPAlbino]

Does anyone have a nice solution to the black screen of death (after logging into Vista the screen goes black with a white mouse cursor on the screen -- can move the mouse, but the rest of the interface is non-functioning) in Vista and 7 without having to reformat and reload?

I figured out a work around, but I lost functionality to IE (which really doesn't bother me too much) and some programs.

I checked all around online and no one seems to have a nice solution other than reformat and reload OS from scratch. It will take me a couple of days to do that (backing up everything and then having to reload all of the programs that I use), and I'd rather not do that. I'm afraid that I will have to resort to that though.

 

[gnilaeh]

have you tried going into safe mode to see if it loads?

 

[EPAlbino]

Safe mode yielded the same results on my machine. Straight to black screen. Really a frustrating problem.

 

[pat mcgroin]

Possibly a repair reinstall?

 

[EPAlbino]

Nope, tried that and came up with black screen again. I have worked on others' computers with black screens that safe mode and repair reinstall worked, but mine was different. Very strange.

The way I got around it was I booted with Linux, renamed a few directories (folders), then did a clean install. Back into Linux and copied old directories into the new install and most everything worked (not IE and a couple of other programs -- WordPerfect works, but the spell checker is disabled -- strange things).

Microsoft needs to make sure their updates actually work before shipping them out and causing these terrible screens of death. Motherboard BIOS up to date; video drivers up to date; sound card driver up to date; keyboard and mouse drivers up to date.

I'm afraid that I'll need to reformat and restore data manually in order to get everything back running correctly. I'm not liking this.

 

[Zoron]

It's impossible for MS to ensure their updates work flawlessly on every single configuration out there. Both my computers are fully updated and neither one has experienced an issue... I don't think I've ever had a Windows update cause any of my computers any issues whatsoever. I've had the odd driver cause blue screens... but then that's not really MS's fault either... as they didn't write the driver.

If you forced a clean install, you should have just worried about copying your data back and just reinstalling your programs. Something in your original install is corrupted.