Screen remains black and cursor does not activate.
Screen remains black and cursor does not activate.
About three months back I began experiencing problems with my computer launching. I was using Windows 7 and encountered various issues—sometimes it would start with just a black screen and a cursor, other times it would hang for about five minutes before crashing. I could boot into safe mode without trouble, but system restore didn’t help. The startup repair tool didn’t find anything amiss. Fortunately, I regularly performed daily backups, so restoring from the previous night’s backup resolved the issue and everything worked smoothly afterward. However, a few days later it repeated itself. (I rarely shut down or power off the machine; it might just restart again.) I thought it was a software glitch, so I opted for a full Windows reinstall and upgraded to Windows 10. It functioned correctly for a couple of days, including several reboots and software installations. Recently, while installing new software that needed a restart, I encountered a black screen with spinning Windows 10 startup icons. After a hard reset, I’m still stuck on the same black screen at startup. Any suggestions? Could it be a hardware problem? I replaced my RAM during this process, so that should help rule out faulty memory. Apart from the boot problems, everything else seems to operate normally if the system boots. Edit—i’ve also tried disabling all non-Microsoft services, but I still get a black screen at startup.
It seems like one of your secondary HDDs was likely the culprit. I removed all secondary drives and the system started working properly. Previously, under Windows 7, they didn’t work even after unplugging them, so I probably forgot about that. It’s tough to recall everything from a three-month troubleshooting phase. Perhaps I rebooted Windows multiple times due to hardware problems, which might have caused software issues. Or maybe Windows 10 handles things better. Now it’s time to identify which drive is faulty.