Blank screen on login

[nicki_bee]

Hello

I wonder if anyone can help me. I have tried looking for a solution on
the web for this and I can’t seem to find anything that quite
matches my problem.

I have a Dell Inspiron 2500 which is a few years old. I have not
recently installed anything new onto it or added new hardware or
anything, but the other day i switched it on and it appeard to be
starting up fine. The Dell screen comes up, the Windows startup splash
screen appears then the screen goes blank. The laptop continues to
load properly (i think) as you can hear the start up music and
everything loading up, but the screen is blank, (tho the colour of it
down change to a slight lighter shade of black!).

I have tried outputting to a different monitor - which does exactly
the same as the laptop screen - displaying the start-up stuff then
blank screen before the login bit.

When i start up the laptop in safe mode and VGA mode it works fine. I
have tried changin the resolution in these modes to a lower one
600x800 (the refesh rate is set to 60) but this does not solve the
problem. I have installed all recommended XP updates, scanned for
viruses and spyware but there’s nothing there, tried to use the
troubleshooting tools in Help and Support but not really sure what im
doing and it says everything is fine!

Can anyone pelase help, I am at a loss what to do. Could it be some
sort of hardware failure with my graphics card maybe?! Dont know much
about that sort of thing.

Thanks very much

 

[Al Romanosky]

If computer starts OK in safe mode the indications are a defective driver -
in your case most likely the video driver. You may have received driver CD
with the laptop or a restore partition may be on he HD - another possibility
is to download driver from Dell.

 

[nicki_bee]

If computer starts OK in safe mode the indications are a
defective driver -
in your case most likely the video driver. You may have
received driver CD
with the laptop or a restore partition may be on he HD -
another possibility
is to download driver from Dell.

Thanks for the advice. I’ll give that a try tonight and let you know
how it goes

Cheers

 

[Guest]

I have similar problem. The problem is on my Asus laptop M1A. My windows XP
was upgraded from Windows ME. The blank login screen problem occurred when I
first booted my windows XP. At that time I thought that was my display
driver's problem, so I boot in safe mode and install the most updated i815
display driver and then I got a usable windows xp for any supported display
resolution for a while. However, I recently converted my FAT32 file system to
NTFS (I had not done so during upgrade). After that, the windows xp boot up
like what you described, it pass the splash screen and the screen becomes
blank when it should be showing the welcome/login screen. But I found that it
can hibernate/sleep by pressing the power button and everything returns
normal when it powers up again. I have tried to reinstall the display driver,
check for virus, perform a "repair installation" (it seems working before
windows update), etc. with no sign of solving the problem. Before today, I
have to boot the machine twice --- boot to blank screen first and then press
the power button to hibernate and then on again --- in order to use my
laptop. However, I found another workaround today --- choose shutdown the
machine from the start menu directly, not logoff first and then choose
shutdown, which I used this method previously, for shutting down the machine.
Then the machine can boot up normally next time! I don't know why it works,
but it suggests the problem it is not a display driver problem, it's a
Microsoft's fault.

I hope somebody from Microsoft can figure out why the two methods of
shutting down the machine are so different (which can determine whether my
blank login screen problem appears or disappears) and release a patch to put
it in windows update, so that all the users suffering this can solve the
problem. Thank you.

Regards,
Peter Lee

 

[Guest]

I think I should add the following information:

1. My laptop runs windows xp home edition sp2 (Chinese version). It has only
192 MB ram.
2. If I use the hibernation workaround, the login/welcome screen does not
display normally for the whole screen on the second boot. However, I am able
to recognize it, fill in the password and pass it. Everything becomes
perfectly normal after passing that screen. If I use the shutdown method from
the start menu directly, everything is normal for the next boot-up, including
displaying the correct things in the login/welcome screen.

I hope the above information helps to diagnose the problem. Thank you.

Best Regards,
Peter Lee

 

[Guest]

Minutes before, I tried to boot the machine (after shutting down the machine
by choosing shutdown directly from the start menu) without log-in at the
welcome screen, but I chose to shut down instead. The next time I booted up,
it’s perfectly normal! I logged in and then logged out, and then I shut down
the machine and booted it again. It’s also perfectly normal! The problem
seems disappeared! I guess the problem may have been solved some time earlier
than doing the above procedure, but I cannot tell you when and how. But I
think I should mention that I had used the windows disk defragmenter some
time earlier. At that time, I believed the windows might not load probably
due to serious fragmentation problem of my hard disk. But in my case, the
problem was not solved just after running the windows disk defragmenter.
Perhaps the machine needs to be on and off several times before it becomes
stable? I don’t know. Hope the above information is useful to someone like me.

Best Regards,
Peter Lee

P.S. I am not quite sure the English Windows terms shown on the English
Windows XP. The terms I used are translation from Chinese.

 

[Guest]

I have the same problem. I have been trying to get it fixed for over a
month. I used to be able to restart normally, now all I get is the blank
screen (sometimes black, sometimes with one white line, sometimes a blurry
whiteish gray). This most recent digression happened after I changed my
resolution in normal mode from 1024 X 768 to the next highest level, thinking
it might fix the problem.
I have a Dell Inspiron 9100 with Windows XP Home SP2. The OS seems to be
consistent for people with this problem, and a lot of people have Dells,
which probably have ATi cards in them. I have an ATi Mobility Radeon 9700
64mb video card. There were two instances where windows told me an error
occured with the driver. I think it is Windows not communicating with the
driver for some reason, especially after a long time being shut down. I have
run full diagnostics on my machine and all my hardware, including video,
works great.
Dell's original solution to this problem was to restart in Safe mode (they
later changed it to VGA mode) and lower the screen resolution, which wasn't
set any higher in safe mode to begin with. I'm sure several people have
tried this 'solution' to no avail.
I can still restart in safe mode after the initial lock. Dell told me to
download the new driver from their site, released in April, so I did. It
didn't help. I think I remember this problem starting after a Windows
update, and I am convinced this problem is Windows related, so I will try to
upgrade to XP Pro.
Also, Ati has a new Mobility 9700 driver on their website, but it only works
with a few brands of computers, not including Dell. Their help and support
section is a joke, and after a few replies about whether or not my card was
still under warranty, I decided not to waste my time.
I'm sorry I can't be more help. If anyone figures this out please post it,
this is becoming a huge headache for a lot of people.
ps- I have a widescreen. And to the person with the 'download a driver'
advice, it doesn't work.

 

[Guest]

I think you should try to check the integrity of your disk and run the disk
defragmenter if the problem started after a windows update, and try what I
have done. This way may solve the problem!

 

[Guest]

I started having the same problem this morning with almost the identical
hardware and configuration: a Dell Inspiron 2500 running Windows XP Home
Edition SP 2, no recent major upgrades or software changes, antivirus and
antispyware software (Norton and Microsoft, respectively) installed and
running. The machine started and restarted normally several times yesterday
without incident.

The machine can be started in VGA mode. Once in VGA mode, the control panel
can be used to reset the display settings to 1024 x 768 and all is fine. But
when the machine is restarted it starts again with a blank screen. I have
downloaded and installed the latest available Intel 82815 video drivers
without success.

I certainly hope someone can suggest a solution to the problem (patch,
driver, configuration setting change, etc.), but based on the messages in
this thread I'm beginning to suspect some sort of subtle hardware failure.