The appearance of the black screen of death is a fairly common phenomenon. True, most users do not attribute it to “deadly” screens, because unlike its blue counterpart, which indicates a failed system component and a brief description of the problem, there is usually nothing on a black screen! As a rule, loading Windows seems to start without visible problems, but at a certain stage it hangs tightly, and the "Desktop" does not appear. Rarely, but you can meet the appearance of two screens in series. In this case, instead of the “Desktop”, a black screen appears after the blue screen of death, which, if not particularly critical, can disappear by itself. How to deal with all this, then we’ll talk.
The black screen of death: what is it and why does it appear?
The most unusual thing when a black screen appears is that the operating system does not in any way report any failures or errors that have occurred, and it is extremely difficult to identify the cause of this behavior. However, based on the opinions of many experts, several typical problems that accompany its appearance can be distinguished:
- damage to the bootloader or system files;
- violations in the operation of some drivers (most often a graphics adapter or other equipment);
- problems with user accounts;
- Unauthorized registry changes (including due to virus exposure).
How to remove the black screen of death in the simplest way?
Now let's fix the problems. To begin with, we will start from the fact that the user computer is installed with the Windows operating system of the seventh version or lower. In this case, you can try to remove the black screen of death in Windows 7 by using the boot menu, which is called up at the stage of starting the OS by pressing the F8 key.
As the simplest solution, you can suggest downloading the latest successful configuration by selecting the appropriate item from the list provided. It is possible that the damage is not critical, and the rollback will be carried out normally.
System recovery and startup
If the previous method does not help, you can try to get rid of the black screen of Windows death by starting a disaster recovery system. In theory, this tool should automatically start during several forced reboots. In case of its successful launch, the rollback point can be chosen independently or trust the rollback, which is offered by the system itself.
If recovery is not possible and the black screen of death appears again, try booting from removable media with a distribution kit or from a recovery disk such as LiveCD, and then select either the system recovery partition or the boot recovery. In both cases, one can count on the successful elimination of problems without the need for independent intervention.
Black Screen Fix Utility
But what if the automated means of the system itself do not give the desired effect? We assume that during the Windows boot process you again see a black screen of death. What to do in such a situation?
In this situation, you can use another automated tool, however, from a third-party developer. If a normal start-up is not possible, try using the start menu described above to perform a safe boot in Safe Mode. After that, run the pre-downloaded BSF utility, which will help to identify the cause of the failure and fix it yourself when you reboot.
Running BSF utility on a damaged system
If the system refuses to start in safe mode, and you don’t have the utility itself, wait for the black screen of death to appear, then call the “Task Manager” using the combination Shift + Ctrl + Esc, create a new task through the file menu, write in the launch field program (necessarily with quotation marks), wait for the transition to the download resource, then click the execute button, and not save to the hard drive.
When the program loads, the search for problems and their correction will begin.
Note: The computer must be connected to the Internet. If you want to use a different browser, instead of the location path of the IE executable file, specify the location of the desired browser. If the dispatcher cannot be called, activate it through the command line by entering the taskmgr shortcut (you can immediately select the safe boot with command line support in the menu).
Create a new user
In case of problems with user registration data, when such problems prevent the logging into the system, use Safe Mode, in the “Control Panel” go to the accounts item, create a registration for a new user, then log in under his account and delete the failed registration .
Note that you only need to create an entry that is appropriate for the administrator.
Reinstalling failed drivers and additional measures
But what if the situation is complicated by the fact that first the blue screen of death appears, and the black screen of death appears after it? Usually this only indicates that some problems are observed in the operation of the graphics accelerator. In this case, very often the situation can be triggered by an exorbitant and heavy load on the video card when passing some kind of game, and by the “crash” of its control driver. This can sometimes be seen after Far Cry 4 (the black screen of death just appears after the blue one, and even with a spontaneous reboot of the system and due to just too high a load).
In this situation, it is again necessary to use the safe start, call the “Device Manager” and update or reinstall the management software of the graphics adapter. You can also remove all drivers, or even the device itself, and then install the drivers not from the Windows directory, but using either the original drivers on removable media that came with the purchase of equipment or entrust the installation with automated programs like DriverPack Solution or Driver Booster (for the second utility, the presence of an Internet connection).
It cannot be ruled out that the problem may also lie in the operation of the hard drive, therefore it is better to check it in advance using portable applications like TestDisk recorded on removable bootable media. The same applies to checking the RAM, but in this case, you must use the utility Memtest86 / 86 +. In some cases, the RAM verification utility may not be used, but it will be possible to identify memory problems on its own. To do this, you will need to remove each bar in turn and restart the computer terminal, and if a bad bar is detected, either remove it altogether or replace it with a similar one. The point is that when you remove such a bar, the system can boot completely fine.
Editing startup in the registry: method one
Finally, if none of the above suggested helped, and the black screen of death, as they say, haunts you on the heels, you will have to take drastic actions. If the system does not start, call either the "Task Manager" or the command line, and then start the registry editor (regedit).
First, go through the HKLM branch and find the Winlogon section in it, as shown in the image above, find the Shell key on the right, edit its value by setting it as explorer.exe, then exit the editor and reboot.
Change registry settings: method two
If the problem persists, re-enter the registry, but now on the right, find the Userinit key and look at its value.
It should look like c: \ Windows \ System32 \ Userinit.exe. If something else is indicated, feel free to change, exit their editor and reboot the system again.
What if nothing helps at all?
Finally, if this also did not help, through the start with command line support, restore the bootloader by typing Bootrex.exe / fixmbr and Bootrec.exe / fixboot in turn. If the result is zero, overwrite the entire bootloader using the Bootrec.exe / RebuildBCD command.
If it’s not the bootloader, the last solution remains, which is to burn the Kaspersky Rescue Disk utility onto a disk or flash drive, boot from the media and perform an in-depth scan of the system for possible virus threats, even before loading the OS itself. Naturally, the disk or USB flash drive must be set up as the first device to boot into the primary BIOS / UEFI systems before use. In the case of flash drives, pay attention to the fact that such a drive must be connected to the appropriate port before turning on the stationary computer terminal or laptop.
Sometimes the problem may be related to the latest updates, which themselves are unfinished, so you may need to remove them. In a working system, you can use the standard section for viewing installed updates for this, and if it is impossible to start, use the command line or PowerShell console.
If such methods turn out to be powerless, you will have to test all the “iron” equipment installed on the motherboard, and if you identify inoperative devices, replace them. But before performing such actions, it is strongly recommended to reset the BIOS and return to overclocked processors and video cards to normal mode.