The Black Screen of Death
December 1, 2009
According to the BBC (and doubtless others) Microsoft are investigating a new phenomenon affecting Windows 7 which is being dubbed the “black screen of death”.
Oh ho, methinks! Did I not myself verily encounter a most unwelcome phenomenon with Windows about a month ago which I also chose to describe in those exact terms? Except that it was Vista that was getting stuck at a steadfastly black screen, not Windows 7. I now believe that problem arose because I had a dual-boot arrangement (Vista plus Windows 7) which had not been set up correctly, so that the two OSs did not recognise each other’s presence and therefore felt at liberty to interfere with each other’s file and disk security settings. This had robbed both OSs of permissions to load key system files with the result that Vista’s boot up sequence came to a premature halt with a black screen of death while Windows 7 succumbed to an infinite reboot loop. These problems disappeared completely after I reinstalled Windows 7 from scratch and used NeoSmart Technologies’ EasyBCD to set up the boot options menus correctly for both OSs.
I have no idea whether the black screen of death now being reported has anything at all to do with the problem I had with Vista, but I would not be at all surprised to learn it was connected with some automatic system meddling with file and disk permissions, either in relation to a dual boot setup or otherwise.
Well, it seems that the story was one great big nothing blown up out of all proportion by the media.
Full explanation from Ed Bott here.
There was probably nothing more to the story than an isolated incident such as the one I encountered and sorted for myself.