Docked Dell laptop shows black/powered-off screen for minutes before boot

0

When powering up my laptop, it takes several minutes where the hard disk is heavily doing its needlework, but no screen appears on either of the monitors connected to the docking station. Also, if one opens the laptop, the built-in screen is and remains empty. Very surprisingly: After several minutes, the bios screen shows up, so all of this seems to happen before the operating system takes control. Then Windows 7 boots and operates normally.

Matthias Ronge

Posted 2013-04-16T08:04:14.990

Reputation: 205

Answers

2

The observation easily leads to a wrong conclusion:

Monitors connected to a Dell docking station seem not to be powered on before Windows is loaded. If Windows 7 triggers a run of chkdisk this results in the behaviour described above. I don’t know why the built-in screen isn’t energized when I open the laptop, it’s just what I found it to be. The chkdisk run is the reason for the hard disk working heavily; and after having it completed, it is Windows which triggers a reboot, which is the cause of the bios screen to re-appear. So it is not the bios which causes the long delay, as one might think.

In my case, the root cause for Windows 7 to suddanly start running chkdisk on every boot since about 12th April 2013 was the faulty security update 2823324 issued by Microsoft.

Matthias Ronge

Posted 2013-04-16T08:04:14.990

Reputation: 205