Just today I ran across rather unpleasant and strange issue with my machine.
I'm running Dell Studio 1749 with Intel i5 M430/8GB/SSD240GB and Ati Mobility Radeon HD5650, running OEM Windows 7 Home Premium (quite tweaked already though...)
After application hang of VMWare, where the end process or end process tree command from task manager did not work, I simply hard-shutdown the system and after reboot I got to the situation where after the "Starting Windows" screen with Win logo on it, I simply got black screen (just backlit) but the sound implicated that the system booted up fine. After blindly entering password and pressing enter, I got to the desktop - still black screen, everything else seemed to work.
Gone to Safe mode, all was fine. Tried system restore from couple days ago, same issue. Safe mode yes, normal boot black screen. After Uninstalling the ATI Driver, I could normally boot into the system, but using default VGA adapter, therefore having max resolution lower than the dedicated screen one, and multiple options of the system disabled (including sleep, hibernation etc..)
As nothing was changed or touched on the machine except the fresh install of VMWare itself (and windows updates), I have no idea what to do more:
Things known so far:
- VMWare was uninstalled back
- System restored to couple days back
- Searched through all register for all "ATI" and "AMD" keys and deleted them
- ATI Drivers reinstalled, tried 3 different versions, all are few years old as this is 6 years old laptop, but all worked fine before
- Tried with Ubuntu Live - display is working fine.
- Tried with 1 month old clone of my internal hard drive (I do clones for backup once a month, it's a workstation!) - booted up just fine into full resolution mode, so hardware issue is out of the question
- if driver is installed, and I blindly log in, I can go blindly through the procedure as follows: Start - "Device manager" - Enter - Tab - "Display" - Right arrow - Down arrow - Alt - Right arrow - Right arrow (this gets me to the "Edit" tab of the menu) - Down arrow - Down arrow - Down arrow - Enter -> This is equal to right clicking the Ati driver and pressing Enable/Disable. When I do that, I disable the driver, and I get the picture back on the screen, in same resolution as in safe mode or with no driver. If I reenable it - again black screen (While enabling, I get the subline char blinking 3 times at top left corner, just as in dos when loading something...?. then going all black again..)
ANY idea as to what could be causing this issue would be highly appreciated. I'm really trying to resolve this crazy error that happened, as I want to know what's causing it.
While I can and will work on my cloned system image, I'm keeping this current to investigate, because there's almost no error that I got into that I wouldn't find a solution, either nice or dirty. Thanks!
UPDATE:
- Just found out that on the device status under Properties of the ATI device, it reports as "Device is working properly"
- The resolution of the screen while adapter is enabled gets set to 1280x1024; With it disabled, max resolution, and the one that is set by me is 1400x1050; Screen's native resolution is 1920x1080.
