JSI Tip 3640. Your computer hangs on the black screen?

If your Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 computer hangs on the empty black screen, immediately after the POST, you could have one or more of the following problems:

1. The MBR (Master Boot Record) is corrupt or infected with a virus.

2. The partition table is damaged.

3. The boot sector is damaged or infected.

4. The NTLDR file is missing or damaged.

If you can start the computer without errors, using a boot floppy, the damage is confined to the MBR, boot sector, or NTLDR. I would backup, and use Disk Administrator to verify the partitions on the boot drive are properly sized. If you have invalid partitions, plan onreformatting the drive and restoring from a previous backup.

Verify that there is no boot virus. You can use an MS-DOS based detector, even if the partition is NTFS.

Run FDISK /MBR from MS-DOS 5.0 or later, or use the Recovery Console FIXMBR and FIXBOOT.

Run a Manual Repair and check the Inspect boot sector and Inspect startup environment.

If the system still won't start, remove the attributes from NTLDR (attrib -r -s -h c:tldr) and copy i386NTLDR to C:.

NOTE: See Windows NT Does Not Boot with Highly Fragmented MFT.

NOTE: If you run a repair, you might want to reapply your latest Service Pack.