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Thread ID: 121216 2011-10-16 23:27:00 Presario F500 problem Driftwood (5551) Press F1
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1237894 2011-10-16 23:27:00 Have a Presario F500 here that boots up to a black screen with just the curser showing.
Have tryed an external monitor, same.
Running vista home basic.
Tryed safe mode & last known good.
Tryed startup repair, no go.
Tryed system restore, no points set.
Hard drive & files are visable while running from vista disc.
Have reseated ram.
Memory self test is not available in bios setup under diognostics. 		Driftwood (5551)
1237895 2011-10-16 23:44:00 Leave it for about 5-10 mins on the black screen with the cursor and see if it eventually loads into Vista correctly.

We've had quite a few machines in the workshop that have come in because people think they are not working.
We set them up on the bench and boot and leave them for a while, come back and they are all good.
It appears it's a Windows Update causing the problem but haven't bothered to find out which one exactly as the problem goes away by itself. 		CYaBro (73)
1237896 2011-10-16 23:54:00 Would it have to be on line at the time? Driftwood (5551)
1237897 2011-10-16 23:57:00 No, just turn it, select Normal boot mode if the menu comes up asking for an option, and leave it for a while. CYaBro (73)
1237898 2011-10-17 00:08:00 You can also try press cntrl alt delete -----> task manager ----> file -----> new task ------> then type explorer.exe and hit ok.

Windows should start normally - Try rebooting or look and see what was installed in the way of patches.

possible fix HERE (securitywatch.pcmag.com) - never tried it as I have other software to fix this problem. 		wainuitech (129)
1237899 2011-10-17 01:12:00 Well the boot & wait didn't go anywhere.
Looking at wainuis possible fix. 		Driftwood (5551)
1237900 2011-10-17 02:15:00 That didn't help either, the reg key was already set to

NT AUTHORITY\NetworkService 		Driftwood (5551)
1237901 2011-10-17 05:22:00 Depending on whats actually causing it, and there can be several things, it may take some time to hit the right answer as there is no one cause.

Have you tried booting from the Vista DVD, going into command prompt and running chkdsk /r ?? 		wainuitech (129)
1237902 2011-10-17 05:46:00 Depending on whats actually causing it, and there can be several things, it may take some time to hit the right answer as there is no one cause.

Have you tried booting from the Vista DVD, going into command prompt and running chkdsk /r ??

I would try that as well - startup repair usually attempts to do that, but I've found that it doesn't always do it.

You mentioned above that startup repair was "no go", did it come up with an error? or did it finish? If the former, there is a log that it produces outlining why it didn't succeed. May help.

Blam 		Blam (54)
1237903 2011-10-17 08:26:00 The system was booted from a vista dvd to run the repair.
It wasn't able to do the repair.
The error log showed success on all test except the last which said:

Root cause found.
Unspecified changes to the system configuration might have caused the problem.
Repair action:System files integrity check & repair.
Result:Failed,Error Code = 0xa

I then ran chkdsk /r which found & fixed errors.

I then retried startup repair.
The last log entry had changed to:

Root cause found:
Boot status indicates that the OS booted successfully.

However there was change to the problem.
I then tried the memory diagnostic tool.
Partway through the second pass the system shut down instantly.
I swapped the memory with some known to be good, no change.
Something must have made it shut down though. 		Driftwood (5551)
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