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On an Acer Aspire 7741G laptop, during startup, the computer stays stuck on a black screen before the Windows logo appears. It also affects safe mode, in fact the black screen is even before F8 procs the mode selection menu.

During this black screen the drive activity led is lit.

Note that the black screen isn't the one with the blinking cursor, it appears right after.

So far I tried sfc /scannow and chkdisk, but nothing changed. There was no restoration points previous to this problem, so I can't try that.

Edit :

As advised by a comment I checked the event log :

  • I can see that there are 2 disk bad blocks errors and a NTFS error "the default transaction resource manager on volume \?... encountered a non-retryable error and could not start". Those events take 10s to process.

  • I have a Kernel-General error that takes 31s to process right after winlogon : " {Registry Hive Recovered} Registry hive (file): '\??\C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\NTUSER.DAT' was corrupted and it has been recovered. Some data might have been lost.". From what I read replacing this file with the one of another user would fix the problem but will basically erase all personnal customization ... Is there another way ?

AlexAngc
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  • Check the Event Viewer for interesting messages. Try to uninstall the antivirus (if not Windows Defender). – harrymc Oct 18 '17 at 10:24
  • @harrymc I disabled all security software. I checked the even logs and I updated the main post with the new data. – AlexAngc Oct 18 '17 at 10:49
  • I don't get why the system is doing the same repair operation all the time, couldn't it be done once and for all ? – AlexAngc Oct 18 '17 at 10:52
  • [trace boot process with WPT](https://superuser.com/a/1205327/174557). For Win7, you need to use the [SDK for Build 10586](https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=698771) – magicandre1981 Oct 18 '17 at 15:15
  • I get a message that 500 000+ events were dropped due to lack of drive bandwidth :-/ – AlexAngc Oct 18 '17 at 18:44
  • from the reply to harrymc I see your HDD will die soon. backup the data and replace it (wit a SSD for faster speed) – magicandre1981 Oct 19 '17 at 17:56

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I believe that you are experiencing serious disk problems. You may also verify this by having a look at the S.M.A.R.T. data, using a product such as Speccy.

I would suggest at first to take good backups of all your data, installed products and their serial numbers, just in case. You might also take a backup disk image, using a product such as the AOMEI Backupper Standard Freeware, then create its boot CD or USB and ensure that it can boot and that it can see the disk on which was written this backup image.

Then you may choose between replacing the disk and trying to revive it.

You may replace the disk by an identical one and reimage back your installation using the AOMEI Backupper boot CD/USB.

You may try to revive the disk by doing a slow format of it. The Windows installation boot CD/USB can do that for you, but rather than installing afresh you could just reimage your disk as above. But if disk errors happen again, then the disk must be replaced.

As you say you got 199 S.M.A.R.T. errors, here is what Acronis says about this error:

Current Pending Sector Count S.M.A.R.T. parameter is a critical parameter and indicates the current count of unstable sectors (waiting for remapping).

This is a critical parameter. Degradation of this parameter may indicate imminent drive failure. Urgent data backup and hardware replacement is recommended.

You currently have 199 bad and unreadable sectors on the disk.

Danger, Will Robinson! Save your data and replace the disk.

harrymc
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  • I got the SMART results with HDTunePro, all status are ok except from "Current pending sector" that is at 199. – AlexAngc Oct 18 '17 at 18:44
  • Isn't there a way to "blacklist" those definitively ? – AlexAngc Oct 18 '17 at 19:33
  • And btw I can't afford to reformat, because the windows backup tool fails due to "I/O errors" ... – AlexAngc Oct 18 '17 at 19:38
  • Windows backup is the worst, don't use it - AOMEI is much safer. As above, reformatting the disk will detect these bad sectors and will mark them as unusable. However, it's not sure that the backup will be restorable. For trying to fix the disk as-is, see [this post](https://superuser.com/questions/46830/is-there-an-alternative-to-chkdsk/524760), although the best products are commercial. I have used SpinRite once to revive a bad disk and it did fix the bad sectors; it's an old product but may still work. In the meantime, don't use the computer for anything else than salvage operations. – harrymc Oct 18 '17 at 19:56
  • Some other alternatives may be found [here](https://alternativeto.net/software/spinrite/). – harrymc Oct 18 '17 at 20:00