screwed my hard drive; power up computer yields a blank screen

[HenryLee1976]

I screwed up my computer by upgrading my Windows 8.1 to 10; I then had a problem with Windows 10, and tried to restore 8.1. Now when I try to start, I see nothing at all on my monitor, just a brief shimmer of light, then blackness. Hitting F12 at startup does nothing, as does inserting a Dell backup and recovery dvd, as well as a Dell bootable flash drive.

I'm getting desperate, so my thought is that if my OS is somehow screwed up, would it work if I removed the hard drive, re-formatted it with another computer, and then put bootable instructions on it, reinstall on my original computer and then power up? Would this work? If anyone has had to do anything similar, or if anyone can help with advice on how to do this correctly, I would be very grateful.

 

[maikutech]

Honestly a good reformat will do the trick, if you still have that iso and you can use a usb flash drive to install it..
Power off your computer, open it up, if you have 2 main drives or more, unplug your secondary drives.
While you have your main drive hooked up and your dvd/cd drive, power on your machine.
Start the installation process if it doesn't boot right from your flash drive, you should have a boot menu that will allow you to access it during prepost.
Let windows installation start up, next tell windows 10 install to format your partition, be sure to delete your dell back up partition.
Use full format, it'll take about 5-10 minutes, next windows will proceed, reboot once and began copying the contents.
When it prompts you for a product key, use your windows 8 product key, microsoft will be using that for your computer from now on.

From that point on it should 1 hour 25 minutes, check on it every so often and make sure it progresses to 100%.
If it stalls for more than the alotted time, come back and post in the hardware sub-forum.

 

[HenryLee1976]

Honestly a good reformat will do the trick, if you still have that iso and you can use a usb flash drive to install it..
Power off your computer, open it up, if you have 2 main drives or more, unplug your secondary drives.
While you have your main drive hooked up and your dvd/cd drive, power on your machine.
Start the installation process if it doesn't boot right from your flash drive, you should have a boot menu that will allow you to access it during prepost.
Let windows installation start up, next tell windows 10 install to format your partition, be sure to delete your dell back up partition.
Use full format, it'll take about 5-10 minutes, next windows will proceed, reboot once and began copying the contents.
When it prompts you for a product key, use your windows 8 product key, microsoft will be using that for your computer from now on.

From that point on it should 1 hour 25 minutes, check on it every so often and make sure it progresses to 100%.
If it stalls for more than the alotted time, come back and post in the hardware sub-forum.

Hi, Maikutech.

Thanks for your info, I tried to implement it, but I couldn't get past my biggest issue: the fact that I can't get anything to appear on screen, period. I created a boot drive from Microsoft Solutions on my flash drive. But when I power up nothing appears at all; I've tried F12, but a I never see anything to select from. Yet it's not the display that's bad; when I press a button on the pc it lets me chose my display type. So, not being able to see any on-screen choices do you have any other suggestions?
Thanks for your help.
Henry

 

[maikutech]

Thats odd, when you power on your computer does it go to your bios ?
Also does your keyboard lights blink 3 times indicating that bios post is ok and recognizes your hardware ?

If not you may need to open up your case, find the reset jumpers on the mobo and reset it.
Take the black or white little jumper and move it to the opposite side.
Unplug the machine and let it sit for 5 minutes, now plug in your cord, turn the power supply on.
Put the jumper back in the default positioned and turn on your computer.
If anything it will beep and listen to the beeps so you;ll know if something is wrong or everything is posting up normally.
Note which motherboard you have and do a bing search such as msi z97 beeo codes.
Also when the display was working how long was it ago and what were you doing that day before it went out completely ?