Windows 7 ate my screen (or how I thought the upgrade had failed)
I like Windows 7, it’s a massive improvement over Vista and my PC’s now work more responsively than a geriatric tortoise. I’ve installed Windows 7 on about 15 different machines now and my installation and upgrade experience has been painless. Until the other day that is…
A friend of mine who runs his entire business (and thus supports his family) from a single PC asked me to upgrade his PC from Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Ultimate. So we set the upgrade going around 10pm one evening.All appeared to be progressing smoothly so I went home and we left it going over night. My friend called in the middle of the next morning to say that something was wrong and that his screen was blank. I know the upgrade can be slow but it should have finished long before then so I advised my friend to power cycle and reboot his PC. The Windows 7 startup screen appeared, then the display went blank and remained like that for several more hours. At this point I started to panic and feel guilty that I’d scuppered my friends PC and ruined his livelihood, at least for a few days if not more permanently.
I went round to look at the offending machine that evening. Sure enough, every time it was rebooted the Windows 7 splash screen would appear then the display would go blank. I tried booting into safe mode only to be greeted by the message that the computer needed to be restarted to complete setup; this rebooted the machine normally but then the blank screen returned. I managed to use the Recovery Console from the installation media to get up a command prompt and examine the log files. I was extremely reticent to attempt any corrective action given how important this PC is to my friends business so I spent 4 hours poring over the installation logs and searching Google. I looked to see if there was a way to roll back the installation and return Vista to the machine (I know Windows 7 does this automatically if the upgrade fails) but I could not find a way to manually trigger this and to all intents and purposes Windows seemed to think that the upgrade had completed. However errors were appearing in the log files indicating some sort of unexpected error (0x8007000A – Bad Environment) every time the machine rebooted.
I concluded that Windows thought the upgrade had been successful but was unable to complete the last bit of configuration that occurs the first time the machine boots properly after the upgrade. After many hours looking at Google I stumbled across a two-line post on someone’s blog which suggest that if the PC had an nVidia 82xx series graphics card and there is a monitor connected to the DVI output you will experience this blank screen behaviour and setup fails to complete. It advised plugging the monitor into the analog output on the graphics card and rebooting at which point the setup would proceed. My friend’s machine had such a graphics card and he has dual monitors, one in each output but the one connected to the DVI was not even detecting a signal and powering up.
So I unplugged the (working) monitor from the analog output, left the other connected to the DVI output and rebooted and that solved the problem! Windows rebooted, setup completed, everything was fine. I suspect the issue was with the analog output in this case as my friend had swapped over the desktop so that the primary output was to the DVI. I could not believe that something as simple as unplugging a monitor fixed what I thought was a pretty serious failure. Several other people I have spoken to have reported similar problems when installing Windows 7 on dual-screen systems.
I thought that was the end of it once we got the system up and running but it seems not. The graphics card will no longer display an output on both outputs/monitors, only the analog output seems to work now. I’ve upgraded the drivers from both Windows Update and the nVidia site to the latest Windows 7 driver I can find but to no avail. The system thinks that there are two monitors connected (which there are) but fails to send a signal out to the DVI output, causing that monitor to sit there blankly. My friend had decided on a pragmatic solution to this – he’s going to buy a big widescreen display and go back to using a single monitor. That’s my kind of solution
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