It started several nights ago. Sometimes I turn my computer off over night, sometimes I leave it on. The other night I decided to turn it off – only it wouldn’t go off. It did the usual shutting down routine where the icons disappear and the drive light flashes a few times, but the screen back light stayed on. What those in the know call the Windows 7 black screen.
Often I work on others computers, but rarely on my own. What is the cause of this? I hold the power button and it finally goes off. Lets see if it will reboot, yes it does to the point where you see the typical green Microsoft screen, then it comes to rest with the backlighted black screen.
Every time I wake during the night, I wonder, have I got everything backed up? Did I bring the backups with me? Will I lose everything? I changed some passwords recently, did I back up after that? I’m reminded of the most famous computer saying, “Its not if your computer will fail, its when.”
Bright and early the next morning the task begins. Safe mode works. Great. External drive connected, everything important transferred again just to be sure, while the transferring is good. Now some troubleshooting procedures. A scan says no malware, hmmm… two display devices and drivers, that’s weird. Reinstall the driver, reboot. Same result, booting begins, then black back lighted screen.
Back to safe mode, more troubleshooting procedures, restore to a previous time, another try at "start windows normally." I have never had much success with system restore. And I still don't.
Again the normally black screen. Back to safe mode again, several times.
Back to safe mode - oops, no safe mode anymore, just the black screen.
Now things are getting serious. This five and a half year old laptop may be at its end.
I check out my recovery and troubleshooting discs. Not much there that would do anything more than what I have already tried. Well one last try. I pop in the Windows 7 installation disc, change the boot order and let it boot up to the troubleshooting mode.
The diagnostic procedure takes a long time and accomplishes nothing, same black screen. I go through the process again, this time to try system restore one last time. I select yesterdays date and it takes forever to do its thing again.
Reboot, same result, no, wait a minute, same result except this time the mouse arrow is on the black screen. That wasn't there on any of the other boot tries.
Power down and boot up the Windows 7 disc again. Same restore selection to yesterdays date, this time watching the procedure more carefully. Nothing unusual or different that I can see.
Here's the final reboot. What the... background picture comes up, login asks for password. A long pause, blank icons on the desktop appear, a long pause again, and the icons take on their natural look and the start up sound plays.
Wow, we are back to normal. Many checks and tests, everything seems to be normal. I am writing on that machine right now. Will it last who knows?
I have worked on quite a few computers with boot problems. None were like this episode. Why didn't the first four system restores work? Why did it fail on shut down instead of boot up? Why did safe mode work only a couple of times? It acted like a display problem sometimes, but not every time.
What caused it? Some weird glitch? Or was it the email I opened that had a subject but nothing in the body? Computers are like that and can take hours to fix. It cost me over four hours of time.
For those of you that say I should have an image backup, I had one. It wasn't as recent as I would have liked, but that was the next step.
Lesson learned. Keep the backup recent, especially if you have recently changed things. How many times have you read about that.
Nothing truer about computers has ever been said: "Its not if your computer will fail, its when."
Post a Comment
What's your take? Agree? Disagree? Comment!