Black screen after Windows starts

XP SP3

Windows starts after computer starts and runs through BIOS. Initial Windows screen shows with animation at the bottom then immediately after the screen shifts to a black screen and stays, hangs. The screen will continue to show until I manual push off the on off button.

I am able to reach BIOS so I know the graphics card is doing ok, as a matter of fact I am using a boot cd of Ubuntu now to reach the web.

 

Try booting in 'Safe Mode' - when you first power up the PC, wait until the first POST/BIOS screen goes away, then start pressing the "F8" key until a Windows Boot Options menu comes up; select "Safe Mode". If this boots to your desktop, go to the Device Manager (right click My Computer > Properties > Hardware > Device Manager), click the little plus sign next to "Display Adapters", right click the item listed and select "Uninstall". Then restart in normal mode (do not press F8 this time during start up). What this does is it 'forces' Windows to reload the video driver and reverts the settings to defaults. If this doesn't work for you, let us know and we'll try something else. GOOD LUCK!

 

Thank you for the reply, it will be around a half hour before I can get back the computer to try this. Recap: get to safe mode, goto Device Manager, expand Display Adapters, click uninstall, reboot and into Normal Windows (no safe mode) > Force windows to load default drivers for video.

 

Went to reboot, here is what I found...
After pressing F8 and after the bios screen, received prompt for all safe mode types and others, pressed for 'Safe Mode' went to next screen to choose the operating system choice, choose windows xp professional, next screen ran through the required processes but stopped at the end without going any further. Screen showed all the processes to be started and ran but never continued pass a black screen with white lettering showing those processes.

Ubuntu does show the hard drive as present with all three partitions as it should have. I press the button to enable access to move on to use the browse button but the 'enable' does not happen and the browse button is left blanked out.

I will have more software to use tomorrow; winternals disc and the os disc.

 

If you have the Winternals ERD Commander, boot it up and use the "System File Repair" feature to scan for and repair any broken/corrupt files. If that doesn't work, boot up ERD again and try using the "System Restore" feature to roll back a few days. If that doesn't work, use your OS disc to either run chkdsk c: /r from the Recovery Console, or simply perform a safe repair installation.... if you need details on any of these steps, feel free to ask!
:-D