Through The Looking Glass

Dealing With The Black Screen Of Death

My Queen’s hard drive went deep six on the day after Thanksgiving. It’s been that kind of year for us. At first I thought that it was simply that the OS got borked, because I put in a Knoppix disk and could see the hard drive. In fact, from Knoppix she backed up her important files. What ensued next is my odyssey through the looking glass to reinstall Windows 7 on her machine.

The first thing you do on a factory install of Windows 7 is to attempt to boot to the recovery console, check the disk and repair the OS from the backup copy on the drive. Unfortunately, the option did not show up for us. Booting every other possible way, safe mode, safe mode command prompt, minimum display resolution, etc… they all resulted in the same condition. A black screen with a movable mouse pointer. I know that there will be people searching this later so I wanted that phrase in the article. If they come here first they will know how to fix this and they will know just how screwed they are. Continue reading →