Black screen at startup

ErrorNullTurnip

Over the past few days I have not been able to launch Minecraft; it always stalls with a black screen before the Mojang logo is displayed. I see that it updates successfully, but then immediately goes to a black screen before the splash and main menu are shown. One strange thing is that while stalled at that point it fully utilizes one core of my system until I kill the process (even after waiting for ~10 minutes).

I can't remember changing anything that would make it stop working, although I have recently installed a few new steam games. I have tried un-installing and re-installing java, clearing the appdata folder, re-downloading a new .exe, running it from a browser, system restore and even a system file check to no avail.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this?

Gorzo

Only things I can think of that might cause this:

1) you may have been using a texture pack that now conflicts with the current version somehow. Go to your .minecraft folder in appdata, check your texturepacks folder, and delete old texture packs to make it go to the default.

2) If you installed a mod or add-on, you may have forgotten to delete the META-INF folder inside the minecraft.jar file. I usually forget to do this every version update when I re-add a new minimap mod and black-screen myself once in the process.

Even if you didn't add a mod or add-on, try opening the minecraft.jar file with winrar (its in appdata/.minecraft/bin) and deleting the META-INF folder anyway, and see if it fixes the black screens for you. As far as I'm aware that folder is 100% useless and causes black screens.

ErrorNullTurnip

I had been using Optifine and a texture pack, but those should have been cleared when I deleted my appdata folder and re-downloaded everything. Since last post I have backed up, removed everything Minecraft related, uninstalled and reinstalled java (tried 6 and 7) but it's still hanging before the splash. I really don't want to resort to an OS reinstall, perhaps I'll try repairing. Anyone have other suggestions?

ardichoke

Use CCleaner to clean up your system? Maybe there's a rogue registry entry or something like that hanging out?

/me grumbles about hating the registry

ErrorNullTurnip

Nope, still nothing. The only other thing I can think of is a fresh OS re-install which I don't really want to do right now.

CaptainMoustache

Did any of those steam games require new video card drivers?

Which version of java are you using? x64, x86?

If you have any backups can you launch any older versions?

Check the event viewer to see if it is throwing any errors to help you track in down.

Maybe a system restore point a couple of days ago?

I'm just throwing these out there because this is really confusing, and I can only imagine how frustrating that must be.

ErrorNullTurnip

No new display drivers, just some directX configuration typical of modern games.

Tried the default java6 that the minecraft.exe launcher brings you to as well as a 64 bit version of java7, neither works. Uninstalled previous java versions first.

Had a few backups since 1.8-ish, didn't work either when I tried them. Tried them before I did a system restore, but not since. System restore was from about a week prior to me noticing the problem. No further restore points, though.

By event viewer, do you mean the log files it spits out occasionally? I don't know what events trigger such a file generation, but I do have 4 of those logs. Ex: hs_err_pid4580.log and hs_err_pid1256.log. This does mention something about "ntdll.dll" and "d3d9.dll" but a system file check doesn't catch any errors.

I neglected to state earlier that I am in fact using Win 7 64 bit. Also, I had been running it using a batch file like this (to run simultaneous versions without copying/renaming):
set APPDATA=%cd% javaw -Xms2048M -Xmx4096M -cp Minecraft.exe net.minecraft.LauncherFrame Each version was in a separate folder with its own minecraft.exe and batch file. All .jar files were automatically downloaded into the new appdata directory (the current directory) by minecraft.

This shouldn't break anything afaik, and was working fine for a while. The cycles of re-installing java seem to have broken the link to javaw and I'm getting the error "'javaw' is not recognized as a command..." so I've been launching it normally (double clicking the downloaded .exe) with "no problems". I suspect I may just have to edit the PATH variables so my OS knows where to look.

Thanks for your help!

ErrorNullTurnip

I finally fixed it. Just did an OS re-install. I really hope it doesn't come back.