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    M1330 Black Screen

    Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by maxpower47, Jul 18, 2008.

  1. maxpower47

    maxpower47 Notebook Guru

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    Ok. I tried booting my 1330 yesterday and it got to the login screen just fine, but after logging in, it just goes to a black screen with the mouse cursor. I can move the cursor but nothing else happens. Ctrl-alt-del does not work either. I did a hard shut down with the power button and tried booting into safe mode. That worked fine. But it still wont boot normally. I tried running the repair utility on the vista disc, no luck. I tried running system restore too, but still no luck. Any ideas?
     
    maxpower47, Jul 18, 2008
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  2. benna

    benna Notebook Evangelist

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    Reinstalling will do :D

    Try booting in Safe Mode
     
    benna, Jul 18, 2008
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  3. Lucanesti

    Lucanesti Notebook Deity

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    Honestly it could be a million things.

    Before you go wiping the thing, (as I hate doing that, so much work involved getting everything back the way I love it) what was you doing before you shut off the time before it messed up?
     
    Lucanesti, Jul 18, 2008
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  4. maxpower47

    maxpower47 Notebook Guru

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    Good question. My wife was the last one to use it. :confused:

    She was probably just dorking around on myspace.

    There was something in the event logs about a problem resuming from sleep, but it could be unrelated.
     
    maxpower47, Jul 18, 2008
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  5. Lucanesti

    Lucanesti Notebook Deity

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    I would try in Safe Mode reinstalling the generic video driver. Also check Device Manager for any conflicts (Yellow !'s)
     
    Lucanesti, Jul 18, 2008
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  6. maxpower47

    maxpower47 Notebook Guru

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    I'll try when i get home.

    Also, already checked device conflicts, there were none.
     
    maxpower47, Jul 18, 2008
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  7. Shel

    Shel Notebook Evangelist

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    Just a reminder, but get Acronis True Image or some similar program (I use Acronis, and LOVE IT) so that should you ever need to reinstall your OS, you have a full backup.

    I've had to reinstall my entire operating system on my previous HP, wiping my hard drive clean, and then restored from an Acronis backup.

    EVERYTHING was back to the way it was when I backed up... book marks, preferences, programs installed and registered.... everything! (Takes a while, perhaps two, three hours to restore, but beats the alternative)

    Don't mean to hijack this thread, but I figured it's a good time to remind people to BACK UP!

    It's not a question of IF you're hard drive will crash, but WHEN!

    (Acronis offers to let people download and demo the program, I believe for 15 days... if you don't have a similar program, do yourself a favor, spend an hour downloading Acronis or similar program, play around with it, and set up a backup program for yourself!)
     
    Shel, Jul 18, 2008
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  8. sesshomaru

    sesshomaru Suspended Disbelief!

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    It could be a corrupt display driver, so uninstalling the nvidia drivers would be the first step. If that doesn't fix it, remove all programs from startup, and disable as many services as you can. then enable them one by one, rebooting after each, to see if the problem crops up with a particular startup option.. It's a bit time consuming, but with a clean event log, that's the only way.

    It does seem to be a video driver problem, though, since the 8400GS causes crashes after exiting sleep, with certain drivers..
     
    sesshomaru, Jul 18, 2008
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