Windows 8 loaded to black screen

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Windows 8 booted, I got the "logging in" circular progress thingy, then loaded to a black screen, with a moving cursor. I was confused since the start screen did not appear. I cannot windows+R, but I could ctrl+alt+del and then open task manager. I used "run a command" in the task manager to run cmd.exe (explorer.exe did not load) and can run programs from either of those places. I could print screen and paste it into paint, then open chrome and load it to imgur here: http://i.imgur.com/8UJvKTX.png and since this opened Paint, and was able to use save and load dialogs even though explorer.exe did not load.

  • I can alt-tab but it looks like an older style of dialog box, like Aero is off.
  • I opened control panel fine.
  • Right clicking a task manager entry lets me show location, opening an explorer window.
  • The windows key does nothing.
  • On the bright side, my passive cpu usage and memory usage are very very low.
  • I was just booted fine in Linux
  • I have Windows on an SSD, with EasyBCD letting me choose windows or linux (which is on a hard drive) and that works fine.

How do I get my desktop back? I'm going to try turning it off and on again but posted this first because I figured I should document it while it was up.

EDIT: I logged out through ctrl+alt+del and logged back in, no go.

EDIT2: Reboot fixed it. Can someone explain to me what happened is my question now? Some weird things happened, too. SkyDrive is refusing to accept my SkyDrive folder location, saying it needs to reconfigure, though the folder is right there. Steam forgot my user/pass but kept SteamGuard.

Oh, also last time I was in Linux (immediately before the weird boot) I ran a SMART scan of both the SSD windows is on and the HDD hooked up to it. Everything seemed fine. Last time I ran memtest86+, roughly 3-4 months ago, everything was fine and I haven't changed hardware since then.

The other weird thing recently is on occasional boots it won't recognize my wifi card and i have to physically reseat it to get it to load.

Andrew Wonnacott

Posted 2013-08-27T01:39:33.720

Reputation: 281

1With the provided information we can only speculate what happen... – Ramhound – 2013-08-27T01:49:36.660

1@Andrew mostly due to conflict of Windows 8 with one of the startup appliction.Had same isue .Fixed by disabling all non Windows startup items – Stormvirux – 2013-08-27T02:24:11.177

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run this DISM command to repair corrupted Windows files: http://blogs.technet.com/b/joscon/archive/2012/09/26/fixing-component-store-corruption-in-windows-8-and-windows-server-2012.aspx

– magicandre1981 – 2013-08-27T04:24:01.850

@Ramhound what information would you like? – Andrew Wonnacott – 2013-08-27T14:24:35.620

@magicandre1981 The DISM stuff seems to have fixed a few things. – Andrew Wonnacott – 2013-08-27T15:48:53.843

Answers

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I know this is a boring answer but I need to mark this as closed.

I fixed the black screen by rebooting.

Also, when I tried running DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth in an admin cmd.exe it did find and fix errors. I don't know if this is related to the problem I'd been having. I did this after a reboot.

Andrew Wonnacott

Posted 2013-08-27T01:39:33.720

Reputation: 281

2The command you used more then likely fixed any problems that could have caused this problem. We can only speculate since you can't reproduce the problem. Be sure to accept your own answer. – Ramhound – 2013-08-27T15:58:54.213

nice to see that my command restored damaged Windows files and fixed the issue :) – magicandre1981 – 2013-08-27T18:30:54.323

Asked: 2013-08-27T01:39:33.720

Viewed: 833 times

Active: 2013-08-27T15:51:17.900