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Today my HP laptop suddenly started having the black screen issue: When booting up, after the Windows logo and the "Starting Windows" message, the screen just goes black. I know Windows keeps going because the startup sounds can be heard. Booting into Safe Mode worked and disabling the display drivers let me boot into regular Windows, though in low resolution. However, when going into Device Manager (not in Safe Mode), the DVD drive, the network adapters and a whole lot of WAN miniports have the yellow icon indicating they don't work.

I have a suspicion it's a hardware problem, because yesterday I was trying to plug in the computer to the wall and the plug wasn't working well, so as I was trying to adjust it, the power kept coming and going, so something may have been fried inside. How can I check whether this is true?

I tried using System Restore, but it appears to be turned off, so no backups are available. I could reinstall Windows (though I'm trying to avoid it), but if there's a hardware problem there's no point, is there?

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  • How did you manage to get into Device Manager not in Safe Mode? Was there any indications of what was wrong with the devices when there?
    – martineau
    Dec 29, 2012 at 19:28
  • @martineau: I managed to boot into regular Windows (not Safe Mode) by disabling the dispay adapters (for some reason, there are two identical ones) in Safe Mode. Device Manager just says "The device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device. (Code 31)"
    – Javier
    Dec 30, 2012 at 23:52
  • Also, I managed to run System Restore from the recovery menu you get by pressing F8 and selecting the first option, and it told me that there's a problem with one of the disks, and I should try run chkdsk /r on it. I did that, and it said it was OK.
    – Javier
    Dec 30, 2012 at 23:53

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