Black screen from laptop. Makes no sense to me.

I have a dell inspiron 1525 laptop. A girl brings it to me saying that there was a problem with it not starting properly and wants me to fix it.

I boot it on, it boots normally, I login as her and wait for explorer to load. No explorer. It shows a background wallpaper, no startbar no nothing. I login to another account..same thing. I tell her I'll reformat it and be done with it.

I take it home, begin the reformat process and it tells me that it can't find the hard drive and to reseat. Odd. I reseat it. Same deal. Will not detect the hard drive. I tell her the hard drive is shot and needs a new hard drive. I order one. We wait a week, get a fresh hard drive and pop it in. I run the xp install...same problem...ok reseat, same problem. I ended up pushing f6 at startup and installing the SATA drivers and that finally fixes that. I finish up the reinstallation everything is looking up.

Fast forward to getting to the desktop. I downloaded all the drivers from the dell website for the inspiron 1525 and flash drive it over to the laptop, drag and drop and start installing. Everything's going great. I install the graphics driver and it asks me to restart...I restart....black screen. Wtf. I plugin a vga cable to a monitor and can see it just fine. The screen works when in bios and when in safe mode..so I know it's not a hardware issue and given that I've just installed drivers I'm thinking it's that. I boot into safe mode and uninstall the graphics driver....restart in normal mode...no black screen. I continue to install the remainder of the drivers and they freeze up literally every time I try to run an install. I say to hell with this I'll do it in safe mode, Boot safe mode, install them ....now keep in mind that at this point I have no graphics driver installed...I restart into normal windows ...black screen...with no graphics driver installed. I plugin a vga cable to a monitor...nothing shows this time. I try FN+F8 key for kicks...nothing. I start thinking maybe it's something really obtuse like the RAM. I start the dell diagnostic up at boot up, run the diagnostic and it tells me that no problems have been found. I want to be very clear: there is no cursor. No mouse. No nothing. No sound. Nothing but the black void of hate that is this dell laptop.

So the problem is. I boot up and it shows the dell logo, the loading bar, the black screen before the windows logo, the windows logo (XP) and then black screen. Runs fine in safe mode. Bios can be accessed. Diagnostic can be accessed but says there's no issue.

I feel like I'm losing my mind. Someone tell me something please.

 

update: I've rebooted it once more, plugged in the secondary monitor, can see the of the blue windows logon screen and the mouse is frozen. The mouse freezes in the first few seconds of the logon screen appearing. it also randomly freezes during the windows xp loading screen sometimes.

 

Hey fifthman,

I feel your pain, but hang in there; there are several guys on here that are real good with problems like you're having. Unfortunately, I'm not one of them. The ones to which I refer are probably asleep right now, but they'll catch up to your posts soon, I'm sure. Sit back and have a cool one

 

Hi my friend , you could use this tool

http://majorgeeks.com/Driver_Sweeper_d6171.html

uninstalling the leftover of the drivers ( run it in normal mode - reboot your machine - run it in safe mode - reboot it again ) after that download the vga driver , you have to download the driver from official site i think !! :wave

 

If I installed a factory fresh hardrive, installed a fresh copy of XP and installed the drivers that were made for the system....how is cleaning all the drivers going to help?

I should also reinforce that I cannot do 'normal mode'. If I attempt to boot normally, it freezes, I can't even make it to the login screen. Every time. Without fail.

 

I'm not particularly good with drivers but since weekends are slow I give you my take until someone can be more specific. I wouldn't jump to a hardware problem.

If it were me, I would go ahead and do a fresh install. You have XP with SATA drivers so 45 minutes for that. My method is boring and methodical but should allow some progress.

Create a Restore Point. Then add install one driver at a time in Normal Mode and reboot after installing each one. This would let you know which driver is causing the problem. Dell's recommended order is here: http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/downloads/en/driver_install_order You can skip the VGA driver since you had problems previously. Go ahead and create a Restore Point after each successful install.

I'm uncertain why there are two chipset drivers listed for the 1525? If you use the service tag number from the tag on the laptop at the Dell site does it eliminate one of those chipset drivers from the list--or do still get two? I'd use the Intel one first. I think the ricoh one is related to a card reader and could probably be skipped for now.

Post back with which one causes the black screen or which one won't install in Normal mode. That might help someone pinpoint the problem.

 

Yeah, just because the company website posts a driver for their hardware, doesn't make it flawless. A co-worker had an issue with a Nvidia card in his mother's desktop. I told him to get an older version of the driver and bam, it was fixed.

Another thing, is that XP up to SP3? was the driver new enough or old enough for that matter, for the version of XP your loading?

You can see the BIOS boot up hit f12 and run diagnostics.

Next time explorer will not load hit ctrl-alt-del and select new task and run explorer, maybe you can get in and fix the issues before blowing it up and starting over.