How do I make Windows 7 boot further than a blank screen with only a mouse cursor?

How do I make Windows 7 boot further than a blank screen with only a mouse cursor? My Windows 7 machine was powered down without logging out first. Now, when booting the PC Windows 7 does not completely start. Instead, it boots to a completely black screen with a mouse cursor that can be moved around but not used to interact with anything. In other words there are no icons or tool bars.
Asked by: Guest \| Views: 389

Total answers/comments: 4

Comments display order:

bert [Entry]

"I had the same issue, but it appeared to be the video driver... windows took the HDMI port as primary screen while there wasn't a screen connected to the HDMI port... so I only had a blank screen and a mouse pointer on my screen connected to the vga port... I was able to fix that using the right mouse button and ""personalize"" and then disabled the primary screen and made the other one (the VGA port) primary.

OTOH I've also had a similar issue with Vista AFTER I changed the structure of my partitions using Acronis Disk Manager, then I wasn't able to get a context-menu out of right mouse button. Just the mouse pointer and a blank screen... I did get the logon screen when pressing ctrl-alt-del though, but couldn't do anything but shut down.
Actually I still have this problem now (but I dual boot to Windows 7 RC 1 all the time, so it is not actually a problem any more, but I would like to know a workaround if you find one!)"

bert [Entry]

"It sounds like you have the infamous stop error. Since you can't run your PC in safe mode, I would try to do a clean install of Windows 7. Hopefully you have your data backed up, because it will clear everything on your hard drive. In case you don't want to resort to that, however, there's other options that you could try out listed here:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/Resolving-stop-blue-screen-errors-in-Windows-7"
"It sounds like you have the infamous stop error. Since you can't run your PC in safe mode, I would try to do a clean install of Windows 7. Hopefully you have your data backed up, because it will clear everything on your hard drive. In case you don't want to resort to that, however, there's other options that you could try out listed here:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/Resolving-stop-blue-screen-errors-in-Windows-7"

bert [Entry]

"Use F8 at the start of booting to get the Windows Advanced Boot Options screen, select ""enable vga mode"", see if it will load graphics now.

."

bert [Entry]

"I had the same issue.

This is how I fixed it:

start with safe-mode
Do a restore some point in the past .(click start and write restore -> choose system restore)
if it did not work, the next try is some older point of restore."