SOLVED: Windows Black Screen With Mouse Pointer Only, No Desktop
If in both normal boot and Safe Mode you see just a black screen with mouse pointer you can try several things to resolve the issue.
For me all was well until I ran through a series of reboots for Windows Updates and my Windows 7 64 bit Professional PC had a problem with one. I have seen this problem before and this time I tried everything listed below but in the end the fix for me was to CHECKDISK with repair switches (/F /R) the drive as detailed in number 5 below:
Unplug EVERYTHING you can from the machine: printers, wireless NIC’s… and try to boot up .
Try LAST KNOWN GOOD in the F8 boot menu. .
press the left SHIFT key 5 times quickly. This should load the STICKY KEYS, EASE OF USE tool and will tell you if your operating system is responding at all. .
press CONTROL + ALT + DEL, bring up a TASK MANAGER, END TASK on EXPLORER.EXE if it is in the PROCESS LIST, then click FILE, RUN and type EXPLORER.EXE . Perhaps Explorer has just crashed and you need restart it. .
Get your PC / Laptop into REPAIR mode (one way to do this is to boot from the Windows DVD, and choose the small REPAIR link at the bottom left), then bring up a COMMAND PROMPT and run CHKDSK D:\ /F /R (note that in my case D:\ was the drive letter for my primary partition when booted from the DVD). .
Get your PC / Laptop into REPAIR mode and try to restore to a PREVIOUS VERSION.
UPDATE: It turns out that the hard drive is bad according to Seagates SEATOOLS and so I used EASUS TODO BACK UP to clone (ghost) the disk onto a new disk and now all is well. The CHKDSK was at least good enough to get my Windows operational so I could easily clone it.
For me the problem was the resolution of the screen. (The VM had automatically changed for an unknow reason. I have force the Resolution to be the same as my host and then everything was working perfectly :) Hope it help someone else.
What a sloution dude. You saved me getting my ass kicked
You didn't solve anything.
This is just a workaround to a Microsoft bug they do not appear to be able to fix.
The permanent fix appears to be switch to Linux or buy a MAC.
Correct, this is a work around, but changing Operating Systems is hardly practical.
My computer wasn't responding at all to ctrl alt delete, but your suggestion to try stickykeys by pressing shift a bunch did help.
1. press shift a bunch
2. go to control panel from dialogue box
3. search to open task manager
4. run new process
5. enter explorer and press enter
I had similar issue on windows 7 which only happened when my laptop was connected to the domain. It turned out to be because my windows password had expired. Resetting the password resolved the issue.
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For me the problem was the resolution of the screen. (The VM had automatically changed for an unknow reason. I have force the Resolution to be the same as my host and then everything was working perfectly :) Hope it help someone else.
What a sloution dude. You saved me getting my ass kicked
You didn't solve anything.
This is just a workaround to a Microsoft bug they do not appear to be able to fix.
The permanent fix appears to be switch to Linux or buy a MAC.
Correct, this is a work around, but changing Operating Systems is hardly practical.
My computer wasn't responding at all to ctrl alt delete, but your suggestion to try stickykeys by pressing shift a bunch did help.
1. press shift a bunch
2. go to control panel from dialogue box
3. search to open task manager
4. run new process
5. enter explorer and press enter
I had similar issue on windows 7 which only happened when my laptop was connected to the domain. It turned out to be because my windows password had expired. Resetting the password resolved the issue.