PC Black Screen

Pookie Bear

Pookie Bear

Pookie Bear

Soldato
Joined
28 Jun 2006
Posts
5,270
Location
Newcastle upon Tyne
Hi,

I need your help.

My PC is booting up, going through the XP Loading screen and goes into Windows XP but the screen is black - it's not dead, as the standby light has not come on, it's just black. Not a pure black, but the kind of off-black which says to me that it's getting a signal, it just doesn't want to play. The power light is green - indicating a signal, but I can see nothing.

Here is some history - I apologise for the length of this, but I thought it would help to be thorough.

I bought all my new components about 12 days ago (graphics card was a week before that - this week only). Here's the basic info:

Gigabyte DS3
E6400
2x1gb Geil PC6400
Seagate 320gb 7200.10
Tagan 480W PSU
3d Connect X1800XT

My PC has run fine for the last twelve days. I've OC'd it, no problems, up to 375x8 - so it's running at 3ghz. I ran the new Prime Orthos which does both CPUs and it ran ok for four hours. SuperPi ran at under 20s. I played HalfLife2 E1 for four hours straight, followed by Prey for another four hours. No crashes whatsoever. I'd upped a couple of voltages by the smallest amounts - RAM by .01v, CPU up to 1.375v.

I've installed nothing in the last 5 days. Not a thing.

Tonight I was tabbing in and out of City of Heroes while I was browsing the net. After about the hundredth time of tabbing, I decided to quit out of CoH to make it a little easier on me and my machine. Ten minutes after quitting out, my machine gave me a BSOD. I figure these things happen now and then, besides, I had to leave my PC for a while. I come back (having forgotten what happened) and loaded up Serious Sam 2 for some pre-bedtime fragging. Seeing people explode helps me sleep. Ten minutes in, my machine BSODs and I get an error about a fault in a non-paging area (or something - I've forgotten now). My machine reboots and comes back into windows.

I figure it's probably either a driver issue, or a RAM issue. I can load up memtest on my PC, download Omega Drivers instead of Catalyst and see what happens. Before that, I figure I should consider running everything at stock settings, so I reboot and go into BIOS - I'm looking at the screen and I think, no, it broke OC'd, so it should be fixed OC'd. I exit BIOS and when I restart my machine it finishes loading the XP bar and reboots. I try again - same thing. I lower the OC a couple times, and XP loads up (I can hear the XP tune), but the screen is black. If I press my favourites button to open up Firefox, I can hear the hdd chug briefly as it does when FF loads. If I hit Alt-F4, I hear it chug again - if I hit U after that, it shuts down my PC. It seems that Windows is loading fine except for the black screen.

I tried running the system with both pieces of RAM individually and then together. I've reset my BIOS to optimal settings. I'm at a complete loss. Is it maybe the power cable to my graphics card? Is the RAM shafted? Has my HDD packed it in and moved to cooler climes?

Can anyone shed any light on the situation for me? For the record, I do have an old PCI graphics card around, but no spare DDR2 or PCI-e graphics. I upgraded heavily from my old system and replacement parts will be hard to come by, although I can still use my old machine for it's usual functions - such as writing this message!

Thanks you very much in advance for any help you might be able to offer.

Skid
 
I had the same black screen (with Windows running normally in the background) after I fitted a VF900 cooler to my X1900XT. I just rebooted in safe mode and uninstalled the Cat drivers, then restarted the PC in vga mode and re-installed the 6.8 drivers. Everything's fine since then (Silence and 20c cooler :D)

The BSODs probably caused the problem with your gfx drivers, hopefully a re-install will fix them for you.

You'll still need to find out what caused the Blue Screen in the first place. Disable the automatic reboot, so you can see the error message if it happens again.
 
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I like to think I'm fairly clued up when it comes to fixing PC breakdowns, but this one had me stumped last night - after all the reboots and attempts to fix it I just thought, "I'll put up a post for some ideas, go to bed and fix it tomorrow night".

I've got a new cooler arriving for my X1800XT and a whole case-load of Akasa Ambers, so I'll be peeling the machine open tonight (or soon anyway!). I checked the temperatures last night during boots (physically, by putting my hand near each of the CPU, GPU, RAM and NB) and all of them were touchable, quite comfortably, so it's not a heat problem, I don't think.

Thanks for the suggestions, Sir Random and daven1986. I'll try those both tonight and let you know what happens :)
 
I know that your are an experianced technician but sometimes the simpliest of things are over looked, so please don't take offense to suggestions. :)

Are you sure you haven't got the screen res set higher than what your monitor is capable of or any other video settings.. If you can get into safe mode then this is clearly the case.
 
Admiral Huddy said:
I know that your are an experianced technician but sometimes the simpliest of things are over looked, so please don't take offense to suggestions. :)
Click to expand...

One thing I learnt a long time ago is that no matter how much you know, you'll never know everything! I'll accept any suggestions that are offered with suitable gratitude, I expect :)

I've had the system running at 1440x900 on a WS monitor. If safe mode works ok, I'll try testing out some other resolutions (but make sure I stick to something simple and generic for a couple hours!). Thanks for the idea.... :)

I can feel an early finish to get home and try out the various suggestions :rolleyes:
 
Now I have a plan of action for when I get in later. First of all, try to load the OS in safe mode. If it works, reload the drivers (or different ones) and see how that runs. If I can't load XP in safe mode, I'll remove the PCI-e card and hunt about for my old FX5200 PCI which I have somewhere see if I can get the system to run with that....and then try changing/reinstalling the drivers. Rinse and repeat tests.

Also intending running a full hdd scan and a memtest to see if I can find any other issues....and I'll hang-fire on installing my GPU cooler until I can be sure it's not a GFX card problem as I believe it will invalidate my warranty..... :eek:

Thanks for the thoughts and ideas. I'll make sure to come back and let you know what happens. You never know, I might be back with more woes later!

Skid
 
Ok, update for those who offered advice.

I loaded up the system in Safe Mode (despite the PC ignoring my frantic smashing of the F8 key - I had to hit reset in the middle of laoding XP after about 8 attempts!) and it worked. Uninstalled Catalyst drivers, rebooted, then reloaded them. System loaded XP normally with working desktop.

Yippee!

Not had a chance for any testing yet, but I'm going out to collect my new fans and GPU cooler, so I'll run something while I'm away.

I have to say, my GPU cooler is NOT going on my X1800XT for at least a fortnight - I'm hoping that the original crash was driver-related (so I'm going to try Omega Drivers instead of Catalyst) but if it is my video RAM, I'd rather not have my RMA thrown back in my face because of an after-market cooler.

I've also reset BIOS to stock for now until I'm happy with the basic stability of my graphics card has proved itself to me.

Thank you very much for any advice.....and keep your fingers crossed while I run my tests later!

Skid
 
For any who are wondering - all tests passed - couple hours priming, SuperPi long run and several hours of CoH/SS2....oh, and a 3DMark06.

Thanks again :)
 
I can safely add that you're not the only one.....especially in this case ;)




...we'll not mention how my second machine popped up with a corrupted pagefile not 15 minutes after I'd finished getting my new machine up and running, but that was a ten minute fix :)
 
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