Fall Creators black screen of death - please help

[bobdog]

Installed Windows 10 Fall Craters update, which ran without issues. Ran Windows repair and attempted to reboot. Now the machine reboots to a permanent black screen, and I'm in big trouble.

I see the HP splash screen, the blue Windows 10 logo with a spinning circle, a black screen with a spinning circle, and then black screen forever. I never see the login screen.

The recovery console reports there are no registry restore points, although I always make a backup in Windows Repair. It just can't find them for some reason.

I allowed Windows Recovery to run, and it says it can't repair the startup process.

I've forced it to attempt to start up in Safe Mode. Same result.

I can get to a C: prompt using the recovery console. Chkdsk shows no problems.  sfc /scannow ran to completion, but said it could not perform requested actions. Unsure of what that meant.

The machine has a RAID 1 (mirrored) array with two drives. It reports there is a critical error on drive 0, suggesting a partition error of some sort (no issues reported prior to this). Removing this drive and attempting to boot from drive 1, which is reported as healthy, produces the same black screen result.

This machine is about to be retired, but it has thousands of files I need to transfer to the new machine. It's a long time favorite client I don't want to lose.

How do I recover from this?

[Boggin]

The FCU will have removed previous restore points as it is in effect a new build.

I'm not sure if this will work for you but when I've ended up with a black screen, the only thing I have been able to boot up with has been a Kaspersky Rescue Disk.

https://support.kaspersky.co.uk/viruses/rescuedisk

While mine hadn't been caused by an infection but power shutting down when a restore point had hung - it has allowed me to boot back up after it had completed its scan.

The first time I tried it on a Win 7 laptop, it took about 9hrs but recently on an upgraded Win 10 laptop, it was much quicker.

The first time after it had completed, it initiated a chkdsk /f.

You may need to change the boot order which you can by pressing and holding F2 as you switch on - this will get you into the BIOS to use the cursor keys to navigate to Boot then use the cursor keys to select the CD/DVD drive - use F5 or F6 to move it to the top - insert the disk - press F10 to Save and Exit then hit enter.

You may be prompted to press any key to boot from CD/DVD for a few seconds.

When it boots up, select Graphic mode and Ethernet connect for it to update its Definitions.

Hope this helps.

[bobdog]

Best I can do so far is a C: prompt. I connected an external hard drive and I'm currently using xcopy to grab the user directories files, including the Outlook .pst files I need.

This client had Windows backups on another drive, but it turns out that the backups were incremental, and the original full backup had been deleted, so I couldn't restore user files completely. That's just one of the reasons I'm dumping Windows Backup and switching everybody to Acronis. A backup that ain't a backup is worse than nothing.

If that xcopy thing doesn't puke, I'll have the files I need and I can torch it all, install new, larger drives, and do a clean reinstall of Windows 10 on the old machine, time-consuming as it is.

This is the first time Windows Repair has let me down, I'm sorry to say.

[Boggin]

I always used Windows System Image rather than the file back up but since MS have deprecated it in Win 10, I have started using Macrium Reflect Free, but still creating full system images.

I assume you are booted up outside of Windows as you can get to the cmd prompt ?

If that's the case, can you enter bcdedit |find "osdevice" then enter chkdsk x: /f and use the partition letter instead of the x I have used in the cmd.

That is a Pipe symbol before find and is the uppercase of \

I don't know why the machine has responded in that way after running WR, although when I ran it on a Win 7 machine once, that one would just freeze after the reboot.

That is where the system images came to my rescue.

Did you create and boot up with a Kaspersky Rescue Disk ?

[bobdog]

I always used Windows System Image rather than the file back up but since MS have deprecated it in Win 10, I have started using Macrium Reflect Free, but still creating full system images.
-- This was a machine belonging to a client. I was in the process of replacing it with a newer machine.

I assume you are booted up outside of Windows as you can get to the cmd prompt ?
-- I booted from a Windows 10 install CD I had created earlier.

If that's the case, can you enter bcdedit |find "osdevice" then enter chkdsk x: /f and use the partition letter instead of the x I have used in the cmd.

That is a Pipe symbol before find and is the uppercase of \
-- Booting up to DOS shows drive C: as the system disk.

I don't know why the machine has responded in that way after running WR, although when I ran it on a Win 7 machine once, that one would just freeze after the reboot.
-- There was a comment on your download page that described this problem with the Fall Creators update. The machine booted just fine before I ran Windows Repair. Pretty sure I got no warning that a new update for Windows Repair was available.

That is where the system images came to my rescue.
-- Wish I had a system image, or at least a boot disk, but it's not my machine, which is why I was sweating bullets.

Did you create and boot up with a Kaspersky Rescue Disk ?
-- No, a Windows 10 CD using its recovery tools.

I was able to attach an external drive and use xcopy to retrieve this client's files and then transfer them to the new machine. Once the new machine is delivered, doing a reformat and a clean install of Windows 10 is merely annoying.

Thanks for your interest.

[Boggin]

Hope things work out.