Windows 7 boots to black screen with blinking cursor
- by murgatroid99
I have an Alienware M17x that dual boots into Ubuntu 11.04 and Windows 7 Home Premium. Currently, the computer starts at the GRUB loader and will boot into Ubuntu, but if I try to boot into Windows, I immediately get a black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner.
The output of fdisk -l is
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/dm-0p1 1 5 40131 de Dell Utility
Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/dm-0p2 6 1918 15360000 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/dm-0p3 * 1918 64772 504878877+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 3 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/dm-0p4 64772 77827 104858625 5 Extended
Partition 4 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/dm-0p5 64772 67204 19531008 83 Linux
/dev/dm-0p6 67204 74498 58593536 83 Linux
/dev/dm-0p7 74498 77577 24731648 83 Linux
/dev/dm-0p8 77578 77827 2000128 82 Linux swap / Solaris
I have used the Windows rescue CD, and run the automatic error fixer until it finds no errors. I have run chkdsk /R on both the main Windows 7 (/dev/dm-0p3) partition and the recovery partition (/dev/dm-0p2). I set the main Windows 7 partition to be active. I also tried running in the recovery console the commands
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd
None of these helped and the last set of commands deletes grub, which I then have to reinstall from Ubuntu.
I think the last thing I did in windows before this started was install the newest ATI driver for my video card. This would suggest using system restore, and I actually had a restore point earlier (after the problem started), but after whatever I did that restore point does not appear in the list on the recovery disk any more, so I cannot do a system restore.
Is there anything else I can try to make Windows boot properly again?
Edit: Running the suggested commands
bootsect /nt60 c:
bcdboot c:\windows /s c:
was also ineffective.
