Black screen desktop, Failure to boot into windows w/ black screen

skankinred

I have 3 serious problems with windows, and I have just reinstalled windows completely. I still get these problems:


Sometimes on bootup windows fails boot completely, and just stays at a black screen with the mouse frozen in the middle right after the windows logo screen. The HD stops spinning and you have to hit the reset button.

Sometimes windows does boot up, but the desktop is completely black, unless I move a window around and the area I moved the window in, the desktop starts to show up. I have dual monitors set up for dual view, so the right monitor is always completely black, unless I move stuff around to clear it up. It's like using paint, and the eraser tool, only this is the "show my desktop" tool.

Sometimes windows just gets stuck at the windows logo during boot. The HD activity light goes off, and it just sit there with the meter under the windows logo moving left to right. Then after at least 5 minutes or more, the HD comes back to life and it finishes booting.


Here's a picture of what the desktop looks like when it comes up black, with me moving windows over the desktop to make it appear:

profdlp

Get the manufacturers HD test and run it. Give Memtest-86 a pass or two as well. See if backing off your o/c helps.

We'll go from there.

skankinred

profdlp wrote:

Get the manufacturers HD test and run it. Give Memtest-86 a pass or two as well. See if backing off your o/c helps.

We'll go from there.

I just replaced the main raptor 150 HD. So it's brand new 1 week old. I did run the tests on all 3 HD's and all passed now. The HD I sent in had SMART errors with " Spin Up Time" and "Spin Retry count."

I have run memtest twice and no problems with memory. Same with sp2004.

I'll try backing off the O/C.

profdlp

What are the specs of your PSU, particularly the 12V+ and 5V+ rail?

Are these SATA drives? If they are IDE, hunt around in your BIOS and see if there is a setting somewhere to "Delay IDE...". If there is, set it to 2 or three seconds.

skankinred

I have a PC P&C sli 510. And yes, 1 drive is actually IDE, but I have a SATA converter plugged into it so it can connect to the SATA controll on the DFI mobo. I'll try the delay option.

The segate 500gb shows up as IDE, but it's actually SATA.

skankinred

I changed HD delay to 2 seconds and backed down the clock to 250 with memory at stok 250 2.5v. Still getting black screen on desktop. It never happened until I updated to the nvidia driver while I was installing windows. The PWM area seem to be running a lil hot do you think? Might be a problem with the mobo?

profdlp

skankinred wrote:

...It never happened until I updated to the nvidia driver while I was installing windows.

Download all the nVidia drivers again so you have them handy, then run one of the driver cleaning utilities to blow out the old ones. Then give the newly-downloaded drivers a shot.

The PWM area seem to be running a lil hot do you think? Might be a problem with the mobo?

The whole works seems hot to me, but I don't have a lot of experience with Opterons. Maybe someone else will offer their opinion.

skankinred

I tried the latest release, and the beta version. Same thing still.

Leonardo

Did you clean out the old drivers before reinstalling? You really should uninstall (via control panel, not physically) the video card and thoroughly clean out all old video drivers. Then start afresh as if you had just put the video card into the machine.

skankinred

Yes I used driver cleaner.

profdlp

What's the cooling like on your video card? Do you have a table fan you could use to blow extra air into the case (with the side panel off)?

mirage

I would remove and reinstall the CPU heatsink to make sure the thermal interface between the heatsink and CPU is good. It happened to me several times that while changing another component in the case I wiggled the CPU heatsink and it started to heat up and caused system instability. The instability was fixed after reinstalling the heatsink, cleaning, and reapplying a fresh layer of thermal material. Just a possibility that I thought might help you. Same for your graphics card if you have an aftermarket cooler on it.

Oh, by the way, did you clean the dust on both CPU and GPU heatsinks?

skankinred

The GPU temps seem fine and the case has a fan blowing in air from the side over the graphics card and pci slots.

The temps are rather warm since the ambient temperature in the room is about 90-95 degress usually. But I thought opterons can handle up to 70 C before shutting down. I doubt the cpu heatsink has come loose. This is the http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835106061 Thermal take Big Typhoon. It was so hard putting on I thought I was going to break the mobo from all the force required to push it into place.
Here's the GPU cooler.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835106061

The desktop doesn't always go black on my left screen. The left monitor is set @ 1600x1200; but the right screen if set to anything other than 1600x1200 is always black at bootup.

mirage

skankinred wrote:

The GPU temps seem fine and the case has a fan blowing in air from the side over the graphics card and pci slots.

The temps are rather warm since the ambient temperature in the room is about 90-95 degress usually. But I thought opterons can handle up to 70 C before shutting down. I doubt the cpu heatsink has come loose.

I understand you, reinstalling the TT Big Typhoon should be hell of a business. In this case, why don't you back off your OC temporarily just to eliminate that CPU is not the cause of your problem. If you do not see any improvement, CPU is not the problem and you can OC again. If RAM and CPU OC in parallel, you can first try memtest to eliminate the RAM as the cause of your problem before backing off OC . Are there any permanent changes, like vcore mod, that makes backing off OC difficult for you?

I think the CPU shutdown temperature is for saving the CPU from burning out, the instabilities usually start before the shutdown temperature. This may not directly correpsond to your Opteron, but I know from my Pentium-M; it becomes unstable around 64C.

This is not to insist that you should reinstall your CPU cooler but it is just a coincidence that I wanted to mention. I had to do what I recommended to you myself today for an AthlonXP-M system (see my signature). I saw that the CPU temperature was hitting 60C today when my son was playing a game. Then, I remembered that I had replaced the PSU a couple of weeks ago. I had difficulty but I could remove the old one and insert the new one from a tight space without removing the CPU cooler. Apparently I had wiggled it, after reinstalling the cooler just about an hour ago, temperature is now 44C while running Prime95.

Good luck ! I will check your posts, I hope you can resolve this issue soon.

skankinred

I suppose I could take a look at the cpu contact. But there's no way this things moving an inch without being unscrewed. You can pull the mobo out of the case by the heatsink.

I've restored the cpu and memory to clock speeds and voltages, but the screen still comes up black. It's running more hot than usual since it's summer time. I even added heatsinks to the mosfets PWM area.(orange things in picture above)

mirage

Do you mean that after restoring the cpu, memory clocks, and voltages to default values, all those freezes are gone and now the only problem is the black screen which can be eliminated by moving the windows around ?

skankinred

No, the same problems still exist. The lockups are rare, but it's mostly the screen coming up black. If I click the desktop and press F5 to refresh, everything shows up. Except the taskbar sometimes. It's so strange.

mirage

skankinred wrote:

No, the same problems still exist. The lockups are rare, but it's mostly the screen coming up black. If I click the desktop and press F5 to refresh, everything shows up. Except the taskbar sometimes. It's so strange.

This could be Windows Explorer crashing during boot process. If Explorer crashes (you can kill it by yourself to try from Task Manager) Windows restarts it. But some of the taskbar icons and desktop background might be missing upon restart. Can you check eventlog to see if there is any record of this?

skankinred

Nah it's not crashing when it freezes. When It freezes, the mouse is frozen in the middle of the screen and you have to hit the reset button. And I don't think explorer is crashing. Here's a video of what the black desktop looks likes. I have my left monitor @ 1600x1200 and my right monitor @ 1280x1024.


The first scene is just my left monitor, The 2nd is my right monitor; and the 3rd is both screens at once.
http://www.veoh.com/videoDetails.html?v=e96260h46ChyS5


or to download the file
http://www.veoh.com/confirm.html?action=confirm&confirm=c9adfb7ebd22f18f74fdf9b2a8ef09db0f5d9db0aae3a8fca8868b73c6a581d8552bbecbce736b2f514e81908a4b639d90055840e161210e2bba5453fb7afec6&redirect%3D%2Fupload.html

Leonardo

This is a long shot, but have you recently changed any BIOS settings? For instance, a vCore setting too low can cause freezes. I had a freeze just yesterday on one of my machines after lowering the vCore too much.

skankinred

I reset everything to stock. This might not be a hardware problem unless the video card is going bad. I'm doing more tests on the video card now.

mirage

It seems to me that you have eliminated CPU and RAM as the cause of your problems already. I agree, if there is a hardware problem, video card is the possible culprit now. Complete freezes happened to me in the past due to video cards with FireGL X1-128 and GF6800LE. There was no other way out other than the reset button, just like you describe, and I could not resolve that problem with X1-128. But I was succesful with 6800LE. Check the power connector to the video card, sometimes video card does not complain but if the connector is loose or shared with another component freezing or random crashes can happen. This happened to me with one of the unlocked and overclocked 6800LE's.

skankinred

I can't figure it out. I'm going to replace the video card and see if it works.

mirage

I am getting confused while reading the thread from the beginning.

I would do the following steps first if I were you.
- Try memtest86+ for at least one hour and make sure memory is running okay (you say you did this already).
- Try running Prime95 second torture test for about an hour, and monitor the CPU idle and loaded temperature while doing that? I use Speedfan, it gives very useful temperature plots as a function of time. If Prime95 can not complete or the computer crashes, the culprit is CPU. Cooling/voltage/overclocking needs to be corrected. If none of these help I would monitor the voltage fluctuations when the processor goes from idle to loaded, if there are large voltage droops motherboard is faulty, otherwise CPU needs an RMA.
- If Memtest and Prime95 pass, i would focus on the graphics card and some BIOS/VGA driver incompatibility issues. I would try running 3DMark2003 or 2005 several times to test the video card stability.

skankinred

I've done all this already I rand 3dmark 2006 quite a few times as well. It's either driver or video card hardware problem.

mirage

skankinred wrote:

I've done all this already I rand 3dmark 2006 quite a few times as well. It's either driver or video card hardware problem.

Your computer might be just craving for some attention