There are a lot of reasons (apparently) that Windows 7 might not resume from standby. Here is a fix to try but probably only if you are desperate and have these exact symptoms.
My customer brought in a Lenovo X200 laptop, a very nice laptop indeed, that would not boot. In fact after turning on the computer, the dash lights would like but the display would not even flicker, it was completely dead. If it weren’t for the fact that the computer wasn’t booting (and the customer insisted it had not been immersed in water) I would have thought the display had gone bad. However, I knew it wasn’t just a display problem because if it had been a) the machine would have continued to boot and b) we would have been able to see something by connecting an external monitor.
Interestingly, if I removed all the RAM, the machine would provide the beep codes associated with, “Hey stupid, you’ve removed all the RAM”. Replacing one stick at a time did not fix the problem, replace the HDD did not fix the problem. The machine does not have an internal CD, but if it did, replacing it would not have helped.
So, here is a summary of the symptoms:
- Black screen, no flicker or change in state
- Dash lights light but HDD light does not show sustained activity
- Bluetooth light illuminates and stays lit
- No POST
- No BIOS screen
- No beep codes (unless all RAM is removed)
- Same result with battery in and out
This looked like a dead system board and that’s what the repair manual indicated as well. But as it turns out, it was just a hosed CMOS. On this particular machine, the only way to reset the CMOS (that I could find) was to partly disassemble the computer, unplug the CMOS battery then put everything back together. Many machines have a simpler method that can be done using the power button (that did not work on this machine) or some other key combination. If you have a different machine, Google for “CMOS reset” and the model of your computer and you should find a way to do this.
November 17th, 2009
admin
As anyone who has had this problem and consulted Google can attest, there are a lot of reasons why a PC may boot to a black screen with a blinking cursor. I have a list of 15 fixes that I use when I get a Vista computer with this problem (I’ll publish it some day). I recently wrote a post about solving the blinking cursor problem in Windows 7 and wanted to follow it up with another solution that is pretty simple to implement and worth trying if you have this problem in XP, Vista or Windows 7.
This morning I was testing a composite video to USB connector on my Windows XP laptop. I needed to copy some files from a USB thumb drive over to the laptop. I rebooted the machine after installing the drivers and accidently left the USB thumb drive connected. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem but this particular thumb drive is a boot drive for Ubuntu Linux and so my machine accidentally booted into that instead of back into XP. To make a long story short, I got impatient with the shut-down process in Ubuntu and hit the power switch before it was completely shut down. The result was that my trusty Thinkpad would no longer boot, it just sat there with a blinking cursor. I got a similar result trying to boot to Safe Mode.
OK, I admit that a little panic set in as I thought about all the un-backed-up pictures of my daughter on that drive, but I kept my cool (I ain’t no fool), let me tell you what happened then. I removed the drive from the laptop and attached it to a SATA-to-USB cable and connected to my Windows 7 machine and ran a CHKDSK on the drive. Sure enough, that was the problem, CHKDSK found a few errors in the file system, fixed them and upon reinsertion, the drive booted like a champ.
Conclusion: Quite often you can start to solve a compound problem by doing a CHKDSK on your boot drive. If your PC has recently had a BSOD or shut down abruptly, and then subsequently will not boot, it may have hosed the file system, run a CHKDSK. You don’t even have to take the disk out of the machine the way that I did to accomplish this. You can use your Windows XP installation disk to boot to the Recovery Console and run a CHKDSK from there. Vista and Windows 7 installation DVD let you boot to a pretty nice set of tools that allow you to open a recovery window as well (just open a Command Prompt). Just put your installation disc in the drive and turn on the computer, you might have to hit F12 to get the boot menu to force it to boot from the CD/DVD player.
