Vista Black Screen of Death

[tremor77]

Not being familiar with Vista at all, but yet I'm the guy all my friends run to with their problems... laptop was brought to me, boots up to a black screen with mouse pointer, normal, safe mode.. safe with cmd.. all the same. A little research comes up with the BSoD and/or "Reduced Functionality Mode". Fun part = friend has no bootable media like the Vista disk or restore CD... which I'd use to access repair or even command prompt.

So I boot backtrack on USB but, for some freaking reason I cant get the GUI to load.. and cant get the laptops hard drive to mount. One of the simpler causes/fixes I found through google was that BSoD could be caused by corrupted event logs... I was hoping to atleast get into the file system and work from there.

Any suggestions? I was thinking about just making a generic DOS bootable CD for situations like this.. I know there is a CD utility called UBCD (Ultimate Boot) but I've only ever used it with XP/2000. As it looks like I'l be troubleshooting vista and 7 more and more now.. looks like I better find some resources.

[Vulpine]

I remember having the occasional headache when trying to mount Vista partitions with bootable media, but always had better luck when removing the drive and mounting it as an external to another system.

You should be able to download a Vista repair/recovery disc from..."anywhere", really.

This might be a long shot, but give it a try anyways:
Ctrl+Shift+Esc from the black screen w/ cursor to see if the Task Manager will open. If it does, go to the Processes tab and look for explorer.exe and end it. Return to the Applications tab and "New Task...", "explorer.exe".

If that doesn't work, try the "Last Known Good Configuration..." boot option. Something that was recently installed (driver, program, update...) may have busted the system.

[tremor77]

I'll give it a shot.. I'm able to get the sticky keys dialogue box to come up by hitting shift 5 times... at work right now so will try these suggestions out later.