Black Screen of Death

I recently reformatted and reinstalled XP Pro after experiencing "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME" error and frequent black screens. I had a tough time reinstalling the OS. Just before I was about to give up, someone suggested to clear the Real Time Clock RAM/CMOS on my Asus A7N8X motherboard. I was able to get the OS installed and all seemed to be working fine.

Now, the problem is back again. During gameplay, the computer will freeze. I turn the computer off and then back on. When I try to boot normally, I either get a black screen after the windows loading screen or it just restarts itself during the loading. When I try to boot with last known good configuration it does the same. When I try to boot in safe mode, the computer restarts itself. When the computer is booting and I push F8 and select the "disable automatic restart on system failure," I get the "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME" error.

The only way I've discovered to get Windows to load is by inserting the XP Pro CD-Rom and running the Recovery Console. Then I run the command C:\>chkdsk /r which takes about an hour or more, or chkdsk /p. After this is completed, I restart the computer and it will load Windows and work fine until I have to restart or it freezes again.

 

Does the black screen display any info? http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;297185

Steve

 

Thanks for the reply. I tried the commands from that link, but still can't boot up windows. A blue screen displays the error when I boot with the option "disable automatic restart on system failure." But, when I boot normally I get a jet black screen with no info. I tried chkdsk /p and /r, also I tried fixboot and fixmbr. But now it won't even boot up Windows after I chkdsk. Now, I get a black screen no matter how I boot.

 

One other item. I just ran Maxor's disk utility and found errors. I'm writing zeros to the disk.

During my previous reformat/reinstall, the MaxBlast software reformatted the drive in just a few seconds. I suspect these disc errors were not detected. How could they be in that amount of time?

Perhaps I'll do an extensive format with a Win 98 disc.

 

I think what you want is PowerMax This should bring your drive back to factory specs. I haven't tried MaxBlast and yes, a few seconds is not right, this process does take time.