An interesting variation on the blank screen/no video when loading windows xp problem. Normally, i blame the video card driver or the graphics driver as device manager calls it. I simply enable vga mode before xp loads and then fix the underlying driver issue. The weird thing with this computer was that the monitor would go black/blank even in vga mode and safe mode.
I loaded up my trusty bart pe / winPE boot cd and all off the computer's functions work flawlessly. I checked for weird spyware and other malware issues to see if they were to blame. I checked all of the usual suspects. I figured the problem was a weird registry or setting issue. Since this was an XP computer, system restore was enabled and had snapshots going back as far as 3 months. I accessed the hidden file in the root of the drive containing backups of the major registry branches. I renamed the current registry hives,( system and software) to system.old and software.old. Next, I simply copied the respective hives to their new home in c:\windows\system32\config
Almost magically, the pc fired up and the screen had color in all the right places.
I could have googled the problem as I am sure there are many solutions to this problem. Yet, I think this solution was very effective. There was no data lost and the only problems would be if the customer had installed any recent software or hardware in the last 7 days. Fortunately, that was not the case.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment