- Jul 10, 2012
- 102
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- 10,710
I had some problem yesterday when I was about to turn off my PC for the day, and I got a "regular" old blue screen and a memory dump, which was completed. I restarted the PC just to see nothing was wrong, and it loaded just fine. Turned it off without further issues. Today when I started it up it took forever to get past the Welcome screen (Windows 7, very fast SSD), and when it did there was just a black screen with a mouse cursor I could move. Ctrl-Alt-Del did nothing.
I rebooted a couple of times, same story. Rebooted into safe mode with networking, and it did the exact same thing, black screen, mouse cursor, nothing else. Rebooted into safe mode without network and it loaded up fine. Did some googling on my phone and started with the regular reverting to an earlier configuration, and uninstalled the most recent updates and programs (nothing new was installed yesterday though). Also checked regedit for the value to shell and something else, and disabled a number of startup objects in msconfig. No change. Also ran the starup repair tool in F8 repair thingie and did a chkdsk on boot drive. No change. I then figured the network part of safe mode might be an indicator, and tried to delete the Ethernet adapter in devices, and rebooted into a regular startup. And it worked! I got in, without any network obviously, and Windows immediately installed a driver for my Ethernet adapter. I rebooted again and the black screen was back. So I went back and deleted the adapter again in safe mode, and deleted the software driver along with it, and tried to install another driver directly in safe mode. I know for a fact of three different drivers that work for my network card (Killer e2200). The regular Killer e2200 obv, a windows default something, and a Qualcomm Atheros AR8161 driver (same chip). I tried all three, since I had them on my local hard drive, and have used all in the past successfully. Black screen with all.
I got desperate so I went out and quickly bought a cheap Gigabit Ethernet PCI-E card and tried that, and disabled the Killer e2200 in BIOS, and it booted fine, installed right away, and lets me reboot without any further issues.
Is it likely that somehow the onboard Killer e2200 card actually has broken? Seems to be a hardware issue with it now that all the different software drivers made no difference. And everything works fine with it disabled. There was quite a storm in my area yesterday, but I live in an apartment building with Gigabit fiber cabling, and there is a modem/router in between my PC and wall socket Ethernet port, which works fine still. Also a NAS attached to the same modem, still working fine. Seems unlikely a power spike or such would make it to my PC that way with everything else working fine.
If it is a hardware failure there still is warranty on my motherboard I think, but I'm not sure I want to send it in for this, when a cheap PCI-E card works and should work just as fine in the long run, right? No mobo = no PC for me, and this kinda stuff always takes a week or two minimum..
I rebooted a couple of times, same story. Rebooted into safe mode with networking, and it did the exact same thing, black screen, mouse cursor, nothing else. Rebooted into safe mode without network and it loaded up fine. Did some googling on my phone and started with the regular reverting to an earlier configuration, and uninstalled the most recent updates and programs (nothing new was installed yesterday though). Also checked regedit for the value to shell and something else, and disabled a number of startup objects in msconfig. No change. Also ran the starup repair tool in F8 repair thingie and did a chkdsk on boot drive. No change. I then figured the network part of safe mode might be an indicator, and tried to delete the Ethernet adapter in devices, and rebooted into a regular startup. And it worked! I got in, without any network obviously, and Windows immediately installed a driver for my Ethernet adapter. I rebooted again and the black screen was back. So I went back and deleted the adapter again in safe mode, and deleted the software driver along with it, and tried to install another driver directly in safe mode. I know for a fact of three different drivers that work for my network card (Killer e2200). The regular Killer e2200 obv, a windows default something, and a Qualcomm Atheros AR8161 driver (same chip). I tried all three, since I had them on my local hard drive, and have used all in the past successfully. Black screen with all.
I got desperate so I went out and quickly bought a cheap Gigabit Ethernet PCI-E card and tried that, and disabled the Killer e2200 in BIOS, and it booted fine, installed right away, and lets me reboot without any further issues.
Is it likely that somehow the onboard Killer e2200 card actually has broken? Seems to be a hardware issue with it now that all the different software drivers made no difference. And everything works fine with it disabled. There was quite a storm in my area yesterday, but I live in an apartment building with Gigabit fiber cabling, and there is a modem/router in between my PC and wall socket Ethernet port, which works fine still. Also a NAS attached to the same modem, still working fine. Seems unlikely a power spike or such would make it to my PC that way with everything else working fine.
If it is a hardware failure there still is warranty on my motherboard I think, but I'm not sure I want to send it in for this, when a cheap PCI-E card works and should work just as fine in the long run, right? No mobo = no PC for me, and this kinda stuff always takes a week or two minimum..
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