Black screen of f***

alec

alec

White heterosexual male
Orderite
So my laptop had this funny thing happening to it whenever I played an old game (e.g. Diablo, StarCraft, ...): it didn't run the game fullscreen. Instead, there was a small gamescreen surrounded by black borders. Which pissed me off, but Google didn't really come up with a useful solution to the problem, so I sort of accepted it.

Yesterday, though, the whole goddamn screen remained black after starting up my machine. I mean: I can hear Windows loading (the jingle is a dead give-away), but I don't see my desktop and thus I can't do anything with my machine.

I've done the F2 (bios) and F8 thing during start up, but I wouldn't know what to change there even if it stared me in the face.

So... do any of you guys know what the hell is wrong with my machine and how I can solve it?

As for the laptop: it's an old Dell. A Pentium 4 with XP Home Edition installed. No internet.

Please help this poor, unfortunate writer. I dread to think that the +40 pages of new work on my laptop are forever lost... :roll:

-- alec
 
I don't think that the first and the second issues are related. I had some old laptop long, long time ago and it was playing old games like that as well. I think it is somehow resolution / graphic card related. Not 100% sure, though.

About your black screen... doubt you can do anything about it too. Only thing that comes into my mind is walking to some hardware shop and let them try to do something. In worst case, getting the data from the HDD so you can put them on a new laptop.

/Edit: Or well, try to unplug the power / take out the battery. Then press the power button for a while (1 minute?). Now put all in again and try. Maybe that works.
 
Mutoes said:
Might be dead screen, does your laptop have output for second monitor, try that if you can.
Click to expand...

The screen isn't dead. I do see the Windows XP start up screen with the loading bar, but once the bar is full, it switches to a black screen and stays that way. The black screen is 'alive', though, it's just black.
 
Sounds like a video card driver problem. Not sure how you could fix that. Try booting in all modes through F8.

P.S. You don't have an integrated GPU, right?
 
Well ill just throw few ideas to try, if you can access bios there propably is somewhere a option to restore factory/default settings (it usually reads load factory/default settings or restore default/factory settings). Remember to save changes before booting up again.

Try to move the mouse from side to side after the windows jingle, maybe the video drivers crapped so that it thinks you have second monitor plugged in (happened to me once before in xp) even though you dont and is displaying your laptop screen as the second monitor thus showing only the black backround colour. If moving the mouse from side to side reveals the cursor this might be the case.
 
To recoup those lost pages:

Spread some blank pages out on the floor. Then take off your pants and squat above it. Take a big shit.

The quality of writing should be about the same.
 
Jebus said:
To recoup those lost pages:

Spread some blank pages out on the floor. Then take off your pants and squat above it. Take a big shit.

The quality of writing should be about the same.
Click to expand...

:roll:

Thanks for the input, Jebus.

Also:

@ donperkan: yes, it does display bios.

@ Mutoes: no, I can not see my mouse cursor move on the black screen. But thanks for the bios hint, I'll see if that works later today.
 
If you have BIOS access and access to a different machine with Internet I recommend downloading and burning Hiren Boot CD http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/ . You can change boot priority in your laptop to CD and ran miniXP which is included there. Moreover there is plenty of diagnostic/antivir/restore tools there. You should also have access to your HDD from it.
 
Try advanced boot options and chsose safe mode or vga mode that will load the most basic drivers. See if that works.

I'm guessing its a driver problem. The windows logo is displayed before any drivers are loaded using onboard vga drivers which are standard in windows os.
 
I did a reboot from cd and got my laptop to work properly again.

I was not able to retrieve my writing, though. It's probably still on the machine but all traces leading to it have disappeared. I did find some texts back on an usb-stick I rarely use, so that's good. And even though all my nice sentences are gone, the really good ideas do stick, so it's not like I lost everything.

Thanks for the help, guys.
 
Your data can still be retrieved, but it might cost a bit (the professionals charge quite a lot unfortunately). Can the hard-drive be removed and placed in a PC (as a slave drive) as to retrieve your work?
 
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