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My daughter's Windows 10 PC has gone into a mode where the [Asus, HDMI-connected] screen works fine at the BIOS boot stage (HP Sure Start and the swirly Windows dots) but as soon as it gets past that, to where you might expect the small Windows 10 logo to be displayed, all she gets is a blank screen. This is still true if I get the PC to boot into safe mode or into low resolution mode. The LED on the monitor indicates that it thinks it is HDMI-connected to a PC, the PC just ain't painting anything on the monitor.

I have generated a boot log which shows stuff being loaded or not loaded, nothing more interesting than that. The PC hard disk light is behaving as if it were fine all the time, we just can't see anything.

She didn't [consciously] do anything before it went into this state, aside from restarting it. BIOS quick tests all pass. Uninstalling the last "quality update" doesn't help.

Before I reset the machine, are there any other things I might try? I can get to a command prompt from the boot screen: is there anything useful I can do, device-driver-wise, from a command prompt? S'pose I could try finding a restore point. Anything else?

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    Start with a bootable USB key and see if it starts and runs. A bootable Linux USB key will work fine for this to see if the computer runs. If it does, see if you can see the main drive.
    – anon
    Commented Jul 10, 2021 at 22:46
  • Good idea, I have one in a drawer somewhere, will dig it out.
    – Rob
    Commented Jul 11, 2021 at 10:13
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    This sounds like a known graphics driver issue, however IIRC the fix was to uninstall the GPU drivers via Safe Mode, which isn't easily possible in this situation. Launch rstrui via WinRE's/WinPE's terminal.
    – JW0914
    Commented Jul 15, 2021 at 13:24
  • Interesting: if it happens again I will indeed try that.
    – Rob
    Commented Jul 16, 2021 at 15:02

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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For the record I tried booting off an Ubuntu USB drive: worked fine of course but then all the Windows recovery console operations did also, there is nothing wrong with the screen, it was simply getting to the Windows log stage that turned the screen black. There were no restore points to restore to so I used DISM to determine the last update (which occurred the evening of the problem) and then used DISM to remove all of the packages of that except that it refused to remove the security update, which I guess was intended.

But that made no difference. I tried a Windows reset from the local Windows installation and that failed also, as did SFC /scannow, though chkdsk was perfectly happy with the disk.

I tried to reset Windows from a USB disk but that only works if you already have Windows running, which of course I did not. In the end the only way out was to reinstall with a network connection to drag in a new copy of Windows.

Just hope it doesn't happen again.

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