Vista black screen and mouse cursor only at boot up?

[Draeger]

Got a Toshiba laptop here, it's an Equium running Vista Home Premium. It was previously in a sort of "Boot loop" whereby it would show a message during booting saying Windows failed to start properly etc and asking me to allow it to repair the computer. I tried a Vista recovery disk and went through a few fixes but in the end I gave up and decided to wipe it and start afresh. I have the Toshiba recovery DVD here and it runs through that fine, wipes the hard drive, repartitions everything and then reinstalls Vista and all the associated Toshiba stuff back to factory settings.

Here's the strange thing. Despite the drive being reformatted/repartitioned, now once its finished the recovery process and restarts Vista it shows a black screen with white text saying "Please wait while Vista prepares to start for the first time". It takes ages to go away and then the screen goes black. About 5 minutes later, the mouse cursor/pointer appears on the screen and you can move it about but nothing else happens.

So I thought something had gone awry during the recovery process and after restarting it a few times I just bunged the Toshiba DVD back in and went through the process again. However when it finishes it does exactly the same thing!!. I've reformatted and tried this process 4 times now.

Googling "Vista black screen mouse pointer" comes up with not a lot of fixes that are definitive.

Was wondering if anyone here has had this same problem before and if so, how did you solve it?.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[hyperst]

i did an asus lappy the other day for a mate, exactly the same as you describe, i just it left for ages, how long are you leaving it

edit. i also remember there being a total of 3 recovery options and i think it depends on how your hdd is partioned to which one you use, i used the first one at first which didnt work, and after asking my mate how is drives were set(he had a 120gb split to 2 60 gb) i picked option three which mention something about the hdd being partioned and it worked

 

[Draeger]

i did an asus lappy the other day for a mate, exactly the same as you describe, i just it left for ages, how long are you leaving it

This afternoon after the 4th attempt at the restore process I went out for 3 hours as I needed to go get some new tyres for my car. Came back and it was still the same - Black screen with the mouse cursor which would happily move around. How long did you leave your mates lappy for?.

 

[hyperst]

it wasnt that long mate but as my edit to my post suggests , check your options on the restore to see if you missed it

 

[hyperst]

do you have access to a windows vista home premium disc at all, as you could do a fresh install and use the key at bottom of laptop

 

[Draeger]

do you have access to a windows vista home premium disc at all, as you could do a fresh install and use the key at bottom of laptop

What sort of disc would I need to do that?. OEM, Retail?. What would work?.

I think I have a Vista disc here that came with a Dell XPS but I think it is a "Restore" disc rather than a basic Vista disc.

edit. i also remember there being a total of 3 recovery options and i think it depends on how your hdd is partioned to which one you use, i used the first one at first which didnt work, and after asking my mate how is drives were set(he had a 120gb split to 2 60 gb) i picked option three which mention something about the hdd being partioned and it worked

When the restore disc starts it doesn't really give me any options. All it does is allow me to change the size of some partition it wants to use for WinRE by using a slider control to increase/decrease but that's it. Clicking on "Advanced" it says I can install just the OS and leave the WinRE and Data partitions alone. But I've not done that, just went for the first option which says it will wipe all data and reinstall everything.

 

[hyperst]

What sort of disc would I need to do that?. OEM, Retail?. What would work?.

I think I have a Vista disc here that came with a Dell XPS but I think it is a "Restore" disc rather than a basic Vista disc.



When the restore disc starts it doesn't really give me any options. All it does is allow me to change the size of some partition it wants to use for WinRE by using a slider control to increase/decrease but that's it. Clicking on "Advanced" it says I can install just the OS and leave the WinRE and Data partitions alone. But I've not done that, just went for the first option which says it will wipe all data and reinstall everything.

i think you would need the same version of vista thats on the laptop, shouldnt matter weather it be retail or oem.

try the advanced second option, at the moment you have nothing to loose

 

[Draeger]

No dice, tried the advanced option but it has just restarted and done exactly the same.

My brother has a Vista Home Premium disc and he's coming over with it in the next half hour so will try installing that and using the key on the COA sticker underneath the laptop to install.

I'm wondering if I do that and it works, will I need to reactivate Vista over the phone with MS?.

 

[hyperst]

The one i did from restore was allready activated, usually you wouldnt have to ring them, only once ive had to ring and i think that was after motherboard and cpu/memory swap, it should be fine and at least you'll get a clean copy of vista on there with no bloatware from the manufacture.

 

[Draeger]

Cool, trying it now. Formatting the drive first and then will have a bash at installing Vista. Fingers crossed it will work.