Wednesday, 8 July 2015

Booting to black screen with only mouse pointer?

Before updating to Windows 10 I was running Windows 8.1 on my laptop. I have a policy of not constantly updating my Windows as new updates may come with bugs. So I update in bulk whenever I fell like I have time to rectify and restore my laptop in case of a failed update causing glitches.

The last huge update I did before upgrading to Windows 10 lead to a problem. My laptop would boot up to show a black screen on which only my mouse was visible and I could move it around, but no desktop. Something like this:


It suddenly struck me that this would be happening due to a certain application not starting. The laptop had booted up since I could move the mouse. From past experiences of using a method to solve certain problems, I recalled how I ended the task of 'explorer.exe' from task manager and manually restarted it.

So now I decided to give it a shot and try and start explorer.exe manually as I felt that Windows is not being able to automatically initiate that task. I was correct. I manually started explorer.exe for the next one week before another set of updates arrived which fixed the problem.

Here is how to do it:

Step 1: Ctrl + Alt + Del
  • Just press the good old Ctrl + Alt + Del on the black screen and you will be taken to the following screen which is common for Windows 7/8/8.1/10.
  • Start Task Manager.

Step 2: Run New Task

Step 3: Simply type 'explorer.exe' in the dialog box.


There you go. Your desktop and all the icons will now be visible!

Alternate solution:

Just in case this does not work out, here is the solution to restore your system to a previous state by using a 'recovery disk'(can also be a pendrive). You can make this disk using another PC/Laptop running Windows 8/8.1/10.




1 comment:

  1. Well, some device drivers are outdated or corrupted while upgrading to Windows. In this case, black screen occurs. This is one reason resulting in this problem. To verify if the driver is the cause, Driver Talent could be helpful. It does help people resolve the driver problems. Really good. :)

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