Another computer help thread?

[Edan the Man]

I don't usually ask for technical help like this, since most things I can fix on my own just fine, but this morning is frustrating me. Here's the story:

I was just doing some normal web browsing going through some youtube links when suddenly the image on one of my monitors goes all weird. Not really sure how describe it, but it was like horizontal lines distorted across the whole screen. And it was just the monitor that chrome was running in, the other monitor looked fine. So I closed chrome figuring it was just being weird, but the distortion persisted. I restarted my computer to try and get rid of it, but now after restarting, I get a lovely black screen! The computer POSTs just fine, and makes it past the windows startup screen, but after that its just an eternal black screen with a mouse cursor on it (which responds to movement). Restarting multiple times gives the same result. I tried starting in safe mode and it worked, and from there I pulled a System Restore to a few days ago, but to no avail. Same black screen unless I start in Safe Mode.

My best guess was a video card driver problem. I uninstalled and installed new video drivers in safe mode, but that didn't seem to have any effect. I certainly hope its not a hardware problem.

So computer guys, any ideas what to try next? I know we got some knowledgeable folks on here, so I figured why not try some familiar faces here before heading to some specialized forum for this.

[El Barto]

Primary or secondary?  Separate VGA cards or both heads of the same card?  Does the BIOS show up on one or both? 

[Nekov]

My first guess would be using a different cable. After that I'd call tech support 

[Millais]

sounds stupid, but unplug the cable from the monitor and the computer and plug it back in again (or even switch it round). see if that'll do anything.

[Edan the Man]

Primary or secondary?  Separate VGA cards or both heads of the same card?  Does the BIOS show up on one or both? 

The monitor that freaked out was the secondary monitor. While it was still looking weird (before I restarted) I did switch it to primary to see if that would change anything but it didn't, for whatever that's worth.

Both monitors are on the same card, and BIOS show up on both. Well actually, everything shows up on both, since until video drivers load up dual monitors are just duplicate screens of each other. Running in safe mode now, both screens show the same thing, and there's no visible distortion on either.


I'll try screwing around with cables as suggested

[El Barto]

Well,  if you get a picture on both monitors in safe mode,  that pretty highly suggests it's a windows problem.  VGA drivers are a weird-ass thing.  Just uninstalling them through control panel does pretty much nothing.  Neither does installing new ones over the remnants of old ones.  You really need to download an uninstaller that'll seek out and remove every single bit of the old drivers.  ATI and Nvidia should both make such a thing for their respective cards.  There are also third party aps that'll do it.  After that,  then you can install new drivers.

[Edan the Man]

Yeah I used a driver cleaner program as well as a special program to uninstall Catalyst and all it's shit, and even then a normal startup leads to the black screen, with no video drivers at all installed.

If worse comes to worse, a total windows reinstall actually isn't too huge a hassle, since the primary drive is a SSD that shouldn't take any time at all to pull my important stuff off of before reformatting.

[El Barto]

So it's current state is that in normal mode you get a black screen but with a working curser?  That doesn't make much sense.

[Edan the Man]

Yup

[Edan the Man]

I remembered that one of my secondary harddrives has a working windows installation on it, and tried booting from there. It worked perfectly*, so uh... yeah. I think I'll just go ahead and reinstall windows on the main one rather than fool around forever trying to find what the exact problem is. Though I am really curious wtf happened.

*Lots of icons and stuff were broken links to things since I had moved a bunch of stuff around for organization after it became a secondary harddrive, but windows itself and the display and all that worked fine.

**I have become totally spoiled by the SSD, the startup time for the HDD was almost unbearable

[El Barto]

What happens if you try to move something onto the black screen?

[wkiml]

What happens if you try to move something onto the black screen?

The countdown clock to armeggedon starts

[Edan the Man]

Well no more worries now, fresh Windows install and everything is dandy.

[Nekov]

Well no more worries now, fresh Windows install and everything is dandy.