# Solved: Black screen & Blinking dash on Startup



## Blop37 (Jan 25, 2011)

I have a Sony Vaio laptop with an upgrade to windows 7 from vista. Yesterday my computer was really slow so I reset it to try and speed it up. I got passed the Vaio screen but then came the black screen with the blinking dash on the top right corner. The only thing I can enter is BIOS with F2 nothing else works. I can't enter safe mode or anything else. I've tried a few things, but nothing works.

1. Reseting default values in BIOS
2. Removing everything but internal Hard Drive in boot menu.

I have a windows & start up disc

3. Ran Startup Repair: Says couldn't detect a problem if recently attached device then remove it. ( Nothings Connected)
4. System restore ( was successfull but still no go)
5. Ran chkdsk & chkdsk/r from command prompt option

I also contacted Sony Support and with the 15 minutes alotted 

6. Reseated memory

I just want to be able to get into the computer one more time so I can transfer my music and some other important files to my External Hard Drive. Please HELP!!! Any help is GREATLY appreciated.


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## lunarlander (Sep 22, 2007)

Try doing a 'chkdsk /f'

I am thinking it can be weak sectors on the HD.

Then do a Startup Repair again.


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## Blop37 (Jan 25, 2011)

Did the chkdsk /f and Startup Repair again and still not getting past the black screen.


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## lunarlander (Sep 22, 2007)

Lets check for viruses. Go here :http://download.bitdefender.com/rescue_cd/
and download the ISO. Use Imgburn or Nero to burn the image to CD. Boot it and do a scan.


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## Blop37 (Jan 25, 2011)

I'm downloading it now. Will it boot on start up like the install CD?


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## Blop37 (Jan 25, 2011)

It gives me an error:

Disk error 80, AX = 42F6, drive 9F

Boot faild: press a key to retry...

I tried again and it didn't work. I burned it with DVD Decrypter, could that be the problem?


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## Blop37 (Jan 25, 2011)

It only downloaded 101Mb of the 319Mb. I think that's why it's not booting up. I'm going to try downloading it again.


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## Blop37 (Jan 25, 2011)

Ran the anti-virus program. found 2 viruses and they were deleted. I forgot to write down the virus though. Hope that wasn't too important. Still get the black screen though.


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## Blop37 (Jan 25, 2011)

I got this from another forum and it worked great.

I had this happen a week ago after using the first Hazar loader on my HP dv7-1104tx [COLOR=blue !important]notebook[/COLOR].
I could boot from my DVD so went to a cmd prompt and used these two commands:

BootRec.exe /fixmbr

BootRec.exe /FixBoot

I re-booted and back came my BCD menu.

Hope this helps anyone that's looking for a solution.

Thank you lunarlander for your help it's much appreciated.


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