Solved: Windows 7 – Black Screen Blinking Cursor
Well, I’ve had my first Windows 7 problem. I did a clean install “upgrade” of a machine to Windows 7 Home Premium, tested the machine and turned it back over to the customer. He called me two days later when he experienced the infamous (Vista) KSOD. He described the symptom this way: the machine was working fine the night before, but when he turned it on in the morning, it came up with the BIOS screen then went straight to a black screen with a blinking cursor. Yikes, I thought, this is too close to Vista for my tastes.
The machine is a Toshiba Qosmio A45-411 laptop. I’m not actually positive that this is strictly a Windows 7 problem. It turns out that the issue has to do with the computer not finding the hard drive after it wakes up from hibernation. To fix the immediate problem, I removed the hard drive from the machine and turned it on. With no hard drive it the machine, it tries to boot from the network (for some reason it skips over the CD drive which is first on the list). After the unsuccessful network boot, I turned off the computer and re-inserted the hard drive. Hit the power switch and it will again try to boot from the network, then, after a moment, will successfully resume using the HDD.
This particular computer had some problems with SATA LPM (Linked Power Mode) which were supposed to be fixed with a BIOS update. I have a suspicion that this is where the problem lies but I don’t have the time right now to fully sort this. My workaround for the problem is to disable hibernation on this machine as the customer is OK with that. You can read about how to disable hibernation in Windows 7 here. If you use the GUI method Brink describes here, there is a setting for disk power that might be interesting to fool with if you have the time.
EDIT: I’ve added another simple solution for the blinking cursor problem that is not Windows 7 specific.
I’m having the same problem on my Vaio c1z. Looking for a long term solution as I want to continue using hibernate.
Well, I don’t have that machine anymore so I can’t experiment but I wonder what would happen if, under “Advanced settings/ Turn off hard disk after” you told it “Never”. Just speculating here that the HDD gets told to spin down and stays spun down even when the computer comes back from hibernation.
This makes sense. I’ll give it a try, see if it works and let you know.
maybe an Atapi.sys rootkit?
The Atapi.sys rootkit is a possibility. I was seeing a lot of these during December and January this year. However, I don’t recall seeing them successfully attack any Vista or Windows 7 machines, it was normally XP.
I had this exactly problem with a Qosmio F45. Very frustrating! I figured out removing the hard drive would break the boot fail cycle before I found this blog, but a least you’ve confirmed I’m not crazy.
The hard drive spin down is an interesting theory, but I’ve testing forcing hibernation by using the start menu, and it still goes into a boot fail cycle.
I am putting the blame on Toshiba here, not Microsoft. The fact that you can’t even enter BIOS while it’s stuck in the boot fail cycle shouldn’t have anything to do with Windows. Even if it can’t resume from the hard drive, you should still be able to boot from other media. It also seems a little wonky that just removing the hard drive doesn’t break the cycle. You have to reinsert it, watch the weird logo screen (with no BIOS entry prompts), watch it fail to boot from the network, THEN finally see it try to access the hard drive. So strange!
I am hoping a BIOS update will be released to resolve the issue, but I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, substituting Shut Down for Hibernate at critical battery level is a tenable solution.
Thanks for the blog.
Thanks for your comment and expansion on this.
I think that not being able to go into BIOS during this failure cycle is by design. The computer (or HDD) thinks that it is in hibernation mode, in other words, that Windows has not shut down gracefully. You probably do not want to be making BIOS changes while the OS is sleeping as you can end up leaving it in a very weird state.
I agree with you that this is some kind of Toshiba, probably BIOS, issue.