Member Avatar for Kurtismonger

Have a HP dv6000 laptop with Vista 64 Home Edition. Thursday morning the user reported it booted to the desktop and then the screen went black. He rebooted, and now the system will boot past the Windows progress bar, but hangs on a black screen displaying only the mouse cursor. Same thing happens in safe mode. Cannot CTRL-ALT-Delete or CTRL-SHIFT-ESC.
In troubleshooting, I used a Vista Repair disk but it it says there are no startup issues to repair. I also tried renaming the log directory in C:\Windows\System32\winevt
I can see from the logs that updates were applied the day before so I'm leaning toward those as the culprit, since it started having problems on the next boot.
Any suggestions or anyway to rollback recent update installs?

There is no restore point either.

Edited by Kurtismonger because: n/a
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A few targeted, non-destructive checks to try before a full wipe — these often recover Vista machines that boot to a black screen with only the cursor. As suggested, use the install/repair media to get into the Recovery Environment (WinRE) or the Advanced Boot Options (F8). The order below moves from quick checks to deeper offline fixes; back up user data first if possible.

If you can get to the Advanced Boot Options: try “Enable low-resolution video (640x480)” or “Safe Mode with Command Prompt” to rule out a bad display driver. If you get a command prompt (WinRE/Repair → Command Prompt) identify the Windows volume (use diskpart → list volume) and then run an offline SFC and a disk check, for example:

diskpart
list volume
exit

sfc /scannow /offbootdir=C: /offwindir=C:\Windows
chkdsk C: /f /r

Run those commands from WinRE or Safe Mode so SFC can target the offline installation. (learn.microsoft.com)

If that does not help, check the Winlogon startup entries in the offline registry: from the Recovery Command Prompt run regedit, select HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, File → Load Hive, open C:\Windows\System32\config\SOFTWARE and give it a temporary name. Then navigate to Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon under that loaded hive and confirm Shell = explorer.exe and Userinit = C:\Windows\system32\userinit.exe, (fix them if necessary), unload the hive and reboot. Editing the registry offline is powerful but risky — export a backup before changes. (learn.microsoft.com)

If a video driver still looks suspect, boot Safe Mode and use Device Manager to Roll Back or Uninstall the display adapter (then reboot). If you cannot boot at all, as a last-resort from the Recovery Command Prompt you can rename vendor kernel drivers in C:\Windows\System32\drivers (examples: nvlddmkm.sys, atikmdag.sys, igdkmd64.sys) so Windows falls back to the basic adapter on next boot — do this only after imaging/backing up important files. Example:

cd C:\Windows\System32\drivers
ren nvlddmkm.sys nvlddmkm.bak

Prefer uninstall/rollback through Device Manager when possible. (learn.microsoft.com)

If none of the above works, image or copy the Users folder with a Linux live-USB or drive-clone tool, then perform a clean install. These targeted steps have rescued many systems like this; proceed carefully and keep a backup of the drive before making offline registry or driver changes.

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Member Avatar for chrishea

You can try re-booting from the (Vista / Win 7) install disk and try recovery / repair from the menu.

Edited by chrishea because: n/a
Member Avatar for Kurtismonger

Yep, tried that. No Recovery points available and as I mentioned the repair disk says nothing to repair.
Also tried a couple other proposed solutions, including some by MS, none of which worked.

Wipe and reinstall it is. Thanks again for Vista Microsoft! POS

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