New secondary HD, no taskbar/icons/explorer/cursor, fresh install

[Jesseyo]

Hey Toms!

My system:
-Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 Socket AM3+ 990FX ATX
-AMD FX 8120 AM3+
-Patriot Viper Xtreme Series 8GB DDR3-1866 (PC3-15000) (4gbx2)
-ATi 6850 HD GPU (Sapphire)
-OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD (existing)
-WD Caviar Green 500GB HD (old, removed)
-WD Caviar Black 1TB HD (new)
-650w PSU

I had basically everything except music/pictures on the SSD, with the old hard drive just there for storage. Knowing this, I plugged in my new hard drive and got it formatted to NTSF. After I was able to move files over to the new drive, I turn off my system, took the old 500GB out, placed the new HD in the same slot and sata cable config, powered up and had a disk boot error. Fiddled with it for an hour or so and decided to reinstall Windows 7 (64 bit) on the SSD. For whatever reason, after the install, I can install the motherboard drivers, restart, install windows updates (including video card drivers), restart, then I have the following problem:
-No taskbar, explorer, icons, or cursor
-Default desktop image
-Ctrl+alt+del makes the screen go blank, but I can hit escape to return to the desktop image.
-Ctrl+Shift+esc doesn't bring up a task manager

Tried booting in safe mode. Seems to work but I can't get anything done. I boot safe mode with networking doesn't help me out much either.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Jesse

 

[Jesseyo]

Wow, I feel incredibly stupid.

I had my TV plugged in to my computer and on the install it must have defaulted the computer to that screen. That explains the current problem, but it does not explain the disk boot error. Silly me! At least it works now!

 

[hedwar2011]

Make sure the ATI drivers (video drivers) didn't blow your screen to beyond the viewable limit of your monitor.

Uninstall the video drivers from safe mode, reboot, and download them from AMDs site.

There is a prevalent issue with AMD drivers misbehaving when it comes to scaling a screen and this has been the fix all along.

 

[pauls3743]

Your original boot error is probably caused by the boot loader being on your secondary hard drive, which you swapped out. It's something that can occur with Windows 7 during installation as it creates a hidden partition for the boot loader. Normally the hidden partition is placed on the same hard drive as the Operating System but if there's more than one hard drive connected it could end up on one of the other drives.