Black Screen after boot

sony vio VGN-AW125J
2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 Processor, 4 GB RAM, 320 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive, Blu-ray Drive. Vista Premium


so this laptop boots up and then after the welcome screen the display goes black with a white mouse cursor

when i boot into safe mode i get the same black screen with the safe mode in all 4 corners and a build 6001:sp 1 in the center. i can cntr-alt-del to get to the 'lock this computer' menu (which displays fine). i then choose start task manager, trying to figure out whats going on, but then it goes back tot he safe mode black screen with the white cursor. if i enable onscreen typing i can see that in the safe mode screen ... but i cant get anything else to appear.

thanks for any suggestions you might have

running

What's the history behind the problem?
Just woke up one day to find this?
Were ANY type of changes done prior to getting the black screen?

safe mode with command prompt give me access to the command prompt. from there i can open up other windows such as notepad and regedit. ive been looking for explorer.exe but i cant seem to find it.


edit- i take that back ... i see it here under c:\windows\

when i type out explorer.exe nothing happens

im troubleshooting a co-workers laptop

they claim that they just woke up to this problem, its actually the laptop of their spouse so they might need to go home and ask

Once it's booted up - try hitting the fn + F8 keys.

i hit that while it was booting up and i get 'advanced boot options' (btw - thanks, i never knew that).

im tempted to choose last known good configuration or low resolution video. but i think the problem is with explorer and not the video card.

i chose system recovery.

i ran startup repair ... but that didnt find any errors.

i am currently running system restore to see if that fixes it.


thanks again

system restore gives me the same black screen with white mouse cursor (cntrl-alt-del does not seem to function). everything looks great until it gets past the welcome screen.

i have these restore points:

7/1 - scheduled checkpoint (this is the one that i tried)
6/29 - scheduled checkpoint
6/24 - install windows update
6/24 - scheduled checkpoint
6/20 - scheduled checkpoint
6/14 - scheduled checkpoint
6/13 - install windows update
6/10 - device driver package install: trend micro network service

im thinking of restoring it to the 6/24 before the windows update ...

im going to do some research first

i just tried 'Last Known Good Configuration (advanced)'. the results are the same ... looks great until right after the welcome screen and then boom ... black screen with a white mouse pointer.

i guess widows thinks that it is operating normally

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Steve R Jones

Once it's booted up - try hitting the fn + F8 keys.

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Try it again after making sure it's booted up as far as it'll go.

You could also try hooking up an external monitor.

the machine will not recognize the fn-f7 combination. when i hooked up an external monitor ... the (laptop) display resolution did change tho.

update -

i opened up the services screen from safemode with command prompt (services.msc) and then i looked at the services that were running. i decided to shut down the event log service and then disable it. it worked.

so now im infront of a working computer ... i decided to open up the event viewer to see if theres anything interesting in there. well the service isnt started so it wont do anything. so i enable the service and then i start it. i go to the event viewer and i select open log. the machine is hung again.

so it seems that one of the event viewer logs is borked.

so it says some MMC snapins are not working ... i go to the options screen and then i hit delete logs. gonna reboot and see if that was enough.

so even with deleting the log files ... the machine with the event viewer service turned on will cause the machine to hang.

so ive gotten the machine working by disabling the event viewer.

now i just need to figure out how to blow away the log files and then make new ones