Black screen on start up-can only access bios

Seal100

Seal100

Seal100

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3 Nov 2010
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Hampshire
Hey all, if this is the wrong part of the forum, I apologise, but this is a rather urgent failure of my computer.

I have an ATI graphics card and I tried moving from the 11.5 drivers to the 11.6. I did it the correct way as in completely uninstalling the old drivers before hand, however during installing the 11.6 driver, I got the BSOD with that IQL_Not_Less_Or_Equal (Might've spelled it wrong) error. The description of the BSOD seemed to say it was due to the ATI drivers. Anyway, I probably did the stupid thing and went back into windows to rid myself of the partly installed 11.6 Driver, and roll back to an older version. However, when trying to uninstall the driver I got the same BSOD as before. I then tried to restart my computer, only to find that other than motherboard bios options, my screen is completely black. There's no sign of booting into windows or anything. I thought the hard drive was dead, but after some testing, it turned out it was just fine. This seems that it is most likely a graphics driver issue, yet I don't know how to solve it. Can anyone please help me?
 
Plec said:
What have you tried so far?

Have you tried 'safe mode' or 'windows recovery' via the disk?
Click to expand...

Via the disk? You can do that? wow, I'm such a noob, thanks a tonne for the help, I'm going to try this out right now!


Edit: It seems that didn't work, the screen remained black. Will give it a few more tries but it doesn't seem likely.

Edit: Scratch that, It's now working.
 
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Well, this isn't going too well. Start up repair can't fix the issue. System restore says this: "To use System Restore, you must specify which Windows installing to restore. Restart this computer, select an operating system, and then select System Restore." Windows Memory Diagnostic won't work either. There doesn't seem to be an option to run the computer in safe mode. Oops, I forgot to mention, I'm using Windows 7.

Edit: Is it possible that somehow my OS uninstalled itself. I went on to "Load Drivers" and discovered that I had more free space than I should have on my Hard drive. I also looked at the Start up repair details and that said "No OS files found on disk". I suppose this means I'll need to get hold of an external hard drive and back up my data onto that, and do a clean reinstall of windows.
 
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Ok, I managed to fix one thing, this allowed me to get past the loading windows screen, followed by a new BSOD. The error is called PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA. Just like my previous blue screen, it seems to be caused by atikmdag.sys
I am going to try a few things such as attempt to boot in safe mode now that the hard drive recognises the OS, I will try and run the ATI removal tool and see how that goes.
 
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