Black screen with movable cursor on boot

[agentmichaelscarn]

I have a Dell Inspiron 1420 running Windows Vista. When I turn it on, it displays a black screen after the green progress bar, but before the Vista Logo. The mouse can move, but nothing else. It remains this way as long as it is turned on and never actually gets to the Vista Logo or login screen.

The same thing happens when I try to get into safe mode. After the drivers load, I get the black screen of death with the movable cursor.

I tried booting my computer from the OS CD from Dell and selecting "Repair your computer." Startup Repair doesn't detect a problem, and System Restore always fails.

The thing is I don't want to lose any data, so reformatting the HD or reinstalling Windows is not an option. There must be a way to fix the bad Windows files that are not allowing my computer to reach the login screen.

agentmichaelscarn wrote:
> I have a Dell Inspiron 1420 running Windows Vista. When I turn it on, it
> displays a black screen after the green progress bar, but before the
> Vista Logo. The mouse can move, but nothing else. It remains this way
> as long as it is turned on and never actually gets to the Vista Logo or
> login screen.
>
> The same thing happens when I try to get into safe mode. After the
> drivers load, I get the black screen of death with the movable cursor.
>
> I tried booting my computer from the OS CD from Dell and selecting
> "Repair your computer." Startup Repair doesn't detect a problem, and
> System Restore always fails.
>
> The thing is I don't want to lose any data, so reformatting the HD or
> reinstalling Windows is not an option. There must be a way to fix the
> bad Windows files that are not allowing my computer to reach the login
> screen.
>
>

Mount your hard disk in another computer and save all the files you
don't want to lose. Replace the hard disk in your own computer and
reinstall Windows Vista.
--

Wim Hekken ;-)

[agentmichaelscarn]

Thanks -- is there a link that explains how to do this?

And how do you know my hard drive needs to be replaced? Isn't it just a software problem and not a hardware one?

[DellCA]

What Wim is suggesting is to put your hard drive into another computer as a secondary drive so you can back up your data, then put it back into your 1420 and do a format-reinstall. This is not replacing the hard drive, but instead putting it into a working computer so you can get the data. Based on what you describe that is probably the best plan.

If you have not already done so you can run the Dell diagnostics to check for any hardware problems. There are a couple of ways this can be done. One is to press F12 at the Dell splash screen (just after powering on) and then selecting the Onboard Diagnostics option. Another is to boot from the Dell Resource (aka Drives & Utilities) CD, which will run the diagnostics as well. Once in the diags, you can run individual tests or everything in one go. If it gives any errors we can go from there to try and determine what has failed.

If you have, or know someone who has, another 1420 you can try swapping hard drives to see if the problem stays with your computer or follows the hard drive to the other system. This is another good way to narrow down exactly where the problem is (if it stays on your system it is not software or the drive).

One last option would be to try booting from a linux LiveCD just to see if it has problems as well. While this does nothing to determine what is wrong in Windows, it does help rule out hardware being the problem. Also, assuming hardware is OK, you might be able to use the linux environment to back up your data (most linux installations can read from Windows partitions, although I have not tried this with Vista, so I don't know for sure if it will work yet).

If you have other questions about the system I will be more than happy to answer them.

Larry
Dell Customer Advocate