Blank screen on boot for Win 10 PC...

ChrisR

ChrisR

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Hi, we have a Dell Inspiron 620, some 5 years old, which has been working fine up till last night. Then it started running slowly, and finally froze. On reboot, it starts going through the initial screens, gets the green Windows symbol with the whirly dots for a few seconds, then the screen either goes white or blank. Meanwhile I can hear the hard disk chuntering on in the background.

I have run the boot diagnostics (after pressing F12), and everything checks out except the hard drive diagnostic doesn't terminate. No error message, just keeps going.

This machine was bought with Win 7, so I have a system DVD, but it was upgraded to Win 10 during the "free upgrade" period, so I don't have any Win 10 media to load onto a new hard drive (assuming one might be needed). It's a 1TB drive; I think the machine is 8GB of RAM, which is fine for the email and web usage for my wife.

It is backed up to a local hard drive using Crashplan, and also to Crashplan Central.

I have a Mac laptop, which is what I'm using to write this.

Any suggestions as to how to proceed? A local firm say they will run a disk diagnostic lasting 2 -3 hours for £25 up front, and a disk replacement would be £190 (that was over the phone, so may well be other costs). They won't do anything until Monday. Another firm said they would charge me £55 per hour. It looks like I can buy a replacement HDD for somewhere between £45 and £100, but I've no experience of doing this. And I'd need to reload the OS and drivers before I could attempt a restore, so how would I get it back to Win 10?
 
Not sure about windows these days but do they still have safe mode to buy up with. Used to be hit f8 at boot up
 
If the disk check is taking an excessive amount of time it could be in the process of failing.

cheapest option to you is to pop the drive out of the machine and see if you know anyone else with a desktop that you could put the drive in as a secondary disk. then do a chkdsk /r on it and see what the results say. at least that will give you a clue as to whether the drive has issues, and it will attempt to fix any small issues so you could perhaps clone the data onto a new disk.
 
As for the os, you can download win10 on another machine, your Mac, just go for the 'install on another computer's option. Replace hard drive and boot your win10 media (DVD/USB), you can install without entering a key and once completed and the laptop had access to the internet it with authenticate with microsoft.
 
wave01 said:
Not sure about windows these days but do they still have safe mode to buy up with. Used to be hit f8 at boot up
Click to expand...

Haven't seen a safe mode option yet, it only offers F2 for setup or F12 for diagnostics etc. I couldn't see a safe mode option on the F2 screen, although I have now taken a shot of it if needed.
 
The F8 safe mode option is when windows is booting, keep tapping F8 once the BIOS screen has gone.
 
neil_g said:
If the disk check is taking an excessive amount of time it could be in the process of failing.

cheapest option to you is to pop the drive out of the machine and see if you know anyone else with a desktop that you could put the drive in as a secondary disk. then do a chkdsk /r on it and see what the results say. at least that will give you a clue as to whether the drive has issues, and it will attempt to fix any small issues so you could perhaps clone the data onto a new disk.
Click to expand...

I realised a couple of things about the diagnostic... first, it claims to have done a quick check on the memory and asks whether a full check is wanted (recommended). I've just noticed that at this point the hard drive diagnostic has a tick against it. When I go for the full memory diagnostic, the ticks on the memory and hard disk options disappear for 20 minutes or so, when the memory check finishes and shows a tick, meanwhile the hdd diagnostic still doesn't finish. The second thing I realised was that the store I contacted said their hard disk diagnostic would take 3 hours or so. I've decided to leave the Dell diagnostic running for at least 3 hours to see if it does actually terminate. An error message would be really useful at this point.

No obvious person around to pop the hard disk in their PC... but I have left a message with a friend of my wife's who might have some ideas.
 
PaulF said:
As for the os, you can download win10 on another machine, your Mac, just go for the 'install on another computer's option. Replace hard drive and boot your win10 media (DVD/USB), you can install without entering a key and once completed and the laptop had access to the internet it with authenticate with microsoft.
Click to expand...

OK let me see if I understand this. Are you saying that from my Mac I can go to the Win10 pages and download Win10 onto (say) a DVD, and then use that to bootstrap the new hard drive, should it come to that? I do have a DVD writer for the Mac, so that's doable...
 
PaulF said:
The F8 safe mode option is when windows is booting, keep tapping F8 once the BIOS screen has gone.
Click to expand...

Thanks I'll try this after the diagnostic. This is all very helpful, thanks folks! :)(y)
 
OK I let the diagnostic continue, and it did indeed finish, giving the hard drive the OK!

Original problem still persists though. I've failed to get into safe mode either using F8 or F4 on startup (the latter suggestion from the MS support pages after googling win 10 safe mode). It maybe crashes before it gets to that point?

I've downloaded the Win 10 image on my Mac and burned it to a DVD. It's a .iso file. Would it boot from that?
 
i have had similar problems of late.

mine was the graphics driver, can you check something for me.

when it gets to the black screen, press the num lock or caps lock on keyboard. does it respond by lighting up?

if it does then it means it has not frozen.

do you have a password on the PC, if you have press space bar and then type your password and hit enter. see if it loads the login screen, mine did. from there i could resolve

other option is to download the windows 10 to usb from their website and boot off it and go to the repair option, you can troubleshoot in there to get it to boot in to safe mode from command prompts.
 
techmob said:
i have had similar problems of late.

mine was the graphics driver, can you check something for me.

when it gets to the black screen, press the num lock or caps lock on keyboard. does it respond by lighting up?

if it does then it means it has not frozen.

do you have a password on the PC, if you have press space bar and then type your password and hit enter. see if it loads the login screen, mine did. from there i could resolve

other option is to download the windows 10 to usb from their website and boot off it and go to the repair option, you can troubleshoot in there to get it to boot in to safe mode from command prompts.
Click to expand...

a) pressing caps lock does cause the corresponding LED to light up, there's definitely someone home in there!

b) tried a reboot, left a wee while then space bar, password. No luck.

c) changed the boot order to DVD first, put the DVD containing Win 10 download in, but it ignored it and booted off the disk with the standard result. I'm getting confused as to what's going on! At the moment I'd wonder if the graphics card hasn't gone awol, except the boot diagnostic said it was fine...
 
Laptop or desktop? If it has a separate graphics card & onboard graphics can you remove the separate card & plug into the onboard? You may need to tell the bios to use onboard too.
 
ChrisR said:
a) pressing caps lock does cause the corresponding LED to light up, there's definitely someone home in there!

b) tried a reboot, left a wee while then space bar, password. No luck.

c) changed the boot order to DVD first, put the DVD containing Win 10 download in, but it ignored it and booted off the disk with the standard result. I'm getting confused as to what's going on! At the moment I'd wonder if the graphics card hasn't gone awol, except the boot diagnostic said it was fine...
Click to expand...

Make sure caps lock not on when doing password?

Did you get the windows 10 from Microsoft as it builds a bootable USB too if needed. As that's what I used and it worked
 
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ancient_mariner said:
Laptop or desktop? If it has a separate graphics card & onboard graphics can you remove the separate card & plug into the onboard? You may need to tell the bios to use onboard too.
Click to expand...

It's a desktop, not sure about the graphics situation but I'm guessing a separate card. I've got a pic of the BIOS output from Setup which I'll try and add here, might tell us more.
 
techmob said:
Make sure caps lock not on when doing password?

Did you get the windows 10 from Microsoft as it builds a bootable USB too if needed. As that's what I used and it worked
Click to expand...

Caps lock definitely not on when using the password. As I was staring at a totally white screen at that point, I didn't hold out much hope!

I'm going to get a larger USB tomorrow; booting off the DVD I burned didn't work. The download was on my Mac, as I said it created a .iso file, not sure if that is bootable, or needs something else done to it, some kind of expansion? If so, I'm guessing I'd need a Windows machine to do it.
 
ChrisR said:
c) changed the boot order to DVD first, put the DVD containing Win 10 download in, but it ignored it and booted off the disk with the standard result. I'm getting confused as to what's going on! At the moment I'd wonder if the graphics card hasn't gone awol, except the boot diagnostic said it was fine...
Click to expand...

I realise that if the graphics card is OK according to the diagnostic but the screen goes totally white during boot, that probably does suggest a graphics driver issue. Not sure how I can do anything about the graphics driver if I can't see the screen though! Catch-22?
 
Is this the one you got? https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10ISO

When you chose DVD as your boot device, do you see an option to boot from windows?

On mine, I have to press f8 to get my boot menu options(on boot up) then I choose the one I want but in this case I chose USB. Different motherboards are different. Mine is an asus.

Oh, and do you have a functionality mouse cursor on the blank screen?

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...n/6c216e14-a112-461e-9faa-62594e195b13?auth=1
 
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techmob said:
Is this the one you got? https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10ISO

When you chose DVD as your boot device, do you see an option to boot from windows?

On mine, I have to press f8 to get my boot menu options(on boot up) then I choose the one I want but in this case I chose USB. Different motherboards are different. Mine is an asus.

Oh, and do you have a functionality mouse cursor on the blank screen?

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...n/6c216e14-a112-461e-9faa-62594e195b13?auth=1
Click to expand...

a) Yes, that was the source of the Win 10 download. I chose the straight Windows 10 version (not 10N or 10 Single Language) and the 64-bit version, after checking that the original Win 7 was 64-bit (from the original DVDs)

b) in the BIOS options for boot devices all I could do was change the boot sequence. I selected the DVD as the first option, and the HDD dropped back to third place, where the DVD had been.

c) In this case, I needed to press F2 to get the BIOS options up.

d) Yes, I have a visible mouse cursor on the white screen, not sure on the totally blanks screen which sometimes appears.

e) The black screen after boot question does not seem to apply AFAICS. Symptoms are different, and everything has functioned well since Win 10 was installed.
 
ChrisR said:
I'm going to get a larger USB tomorrow; booting off the DVD I burned didn't work. The download was on my Mac, as I said it created a .iso file, not sure if that is bootable, or needs something else done to it, some kind of expansion? If so, I'm guessing I'd need a Windows machine to do it.
Click to expand...

I should perhaps have written that it was not clear whether I was actually booting off the DVD, but there was no change in the outcome anyway. Since found out that a .iso file is a disk image, designed as an image of an optical disk, so I'm not sure whether using a USB drive will make any difference. I will try it anyway.
 
@ChrisR

Unfortunately an .iso file is NOT bootable - you have to create a bootable file from that disk image and this can be done on your mac.

As you are going to purchase a larger USB stick, I would suggest that you get one that is larger than 8gb.

Have a read through this article that I found http://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-windows-10-installer-usb-drive-mac and it will guide you through the steps you have to take to create a bootable usb on your mac.

Hopefully that will get you out of trouble. I don't know what the situation will be in respect of registering the installation - you might be able to use your existing serial number but don't quote me on that!!!!

HTH

David
 
David_H said:
@ChrisR

Unfortunately an .iso file is NOT bootable - you have to create a bootable file from that disk image and this can be done on your mac.

As you are going to purchase a larger USB stick, I would suggest that you get one that is larger than 8gb.

Have a read through this article that I found http://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-windows-10-installer-usb-drive-mac and it will guide you through the steps you have to take to create a bootable usb on your mac.

Hopefully that will get you out of trouble. I don't know what the situation will be in respect of registering the installation - you might be able to use your existing serial number but don't quote me on that!!!!

HTH

David
Click to expand...

Thanks David, I had bought a 16GB USB stick and was stuck with trying to copy the 4.3 GB .iso file on the FAT32-formatted stick. Just given up when I came back and read this. Bootcamp is doing its stuff as I write this. Hopefully this will provide an answer...
 
@David_H It took a very long time for Bootcamp to do its stuff, but it did finish and the drive is now named Wininstall as it apparently should be. Stuck it in the PC and changed the boot order again, rebooted... I'm not sure quite what's happening. There's a blank screen except for a text-style cursor at top left of the screen. I'm wondering if the USB drive is just very slow and it's still booting up but it's been going for half an hour or more!
 
No that's not right. The installation screen should have come up straight away after the BIOS and POST had done their things and the USB drive had been booted up.
Your observations would seem to suggest that there is a problem elsewhere - possibly hardware related.
Unfortunately you are too far away for me to come round and have a look, otherwise I would volunteer to do so.
 
Luckily I found a friend who's an ex-IBM engineer and who offered to take a look at it this afternoon. I took the main box round to his place, and he connected his display, keyboard and mouse, powered up, poked the hidden reset button with a toothpick, booted it up 3 times in a row, and it all came good (apparently after 3 failed reboots Win 10 is supposed to take some remedial action). We had a poke around but couldn't find anything else amiss, so I took it home and added my peripherals bit by bit. All good so far. His verdict, a file corruption somewhere, who knows where.

I'd like to thank everyone who responded on here, for helping me work out many things that the problem was not, and saving me from buying a replacement hard drive, which early on I was convinced I should be doing. I've learned a whole lot, though at my age I'll probably forget it all again before anything similar happens again. Or is that daring Murphy to make it happen next week? :) :) :)

No idea what's gone wrong with the reboot USB drive. Maybe I should re-purpose it as some sort of system recovery checkpoint? Or should I add something to the main backup disk (run by Crashplan)?
 
My friend had pointed out that I only had 4 GB RAM in this PC, which seemed a bit small. Apparently the maximum it can take is 8 GB in two slots, so I ordered two Crucial 4GB DIMMs. They arrived yesterday and, full of trepidation:eek:, I installed them this morning. Seems to have worked.:)

After reading this post in another thread about PC problems, and given the machine is 5 years old, I also replace the CR2032 button cell with a new one. Slightly awkward as it was almost underneath a card plugged in, but got it done. Took a while to work out how to change the BIOS date and time, but got there in the end. All seems to be working fine now. Not sure it's going faster, will need a bit more time to see if there's less disk thrashing going on.

I'm still interested to know how best to ensure I have a bootable USB drive. Best would probably be the 1 TB drive I use for the Crashplan local backup. I must admit, I didn't attempt to boot from it, assuming that it was only backing up the user areas. Anyway, can anyone point me to info about creating a bootable image on there?
 
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Re 4GBvs8GB of RAM, if you're not doing something demanding then it's not going to make a difference. If the HDD is thrashing and the machine has run un-touched for 5 years then there's a fair chance reinstalling windows from scratch (and then the endless-seeming updates) would make it run smoother. Alternatively if you can afford £40 for a 128GB SSD and install windows fresh on that then it will be transformed, relatively speaking, into a snappy & responsive machine.

FWIW I run 4GB in my home machine running Linux, and that's probably a year or 2 older (core 2 duo E6700 IIRC that also runs W10 OK from SSD).

To make a bootable USB drive I would suggest buying a cheap USB3 8 or 16GB USB3 memory stick & using one of the free tools like UnetBootin or similar (it's been a while since I did that) to unpack the ISO file & make it bootable. Alternatively I recall a W10 installer that would make a bootable USB stick. Don't try to do it with your 1TB drive, since all it will contain will be the OS installation files.
 
ancient_mariner said:
Alternatively if you can afford £40 for a 128GB SSD and install windows fresh on that then it will be transformed, relatively speaking, into a snappy & responsive machine.
Click to expand...
I'm thinking of doing this with my old 'all in one' PC. Would that require a 'kit' or will the drive just screw into the existing tray?
 
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