I have an HP laptop running Windows 8 that after boot and login goes to a black screen with the white mouse pointer.
The task manager is accessible via CTRL ALT DEL
Thus the PC seems to be working just fine, just not visible to me.
Now I had a very similar issue on Windows 7 (Lenovo laptop) just last week... however the difference was that normally at work my laptop is docked in a multi-monitor setup. After a weekend full of attempts to login via safe mode I was about to give up. Come Monday morning I go to work, dock my laptop and Presto! the PC detects the extra monitors and everything is restored - even after un-docking moments later.
This leads me to believe that the HP Windows 8 laptop is also having a "Screen Configuration Issue" and a simple reset will very likely solve it.
However I have not been able to find a way to reset this or even boot into safe mode. Booting up and pressing F8, Shift+F8, Esc, or F12 just won't let me in (I'm guessing this is an OEM thing to stop me from "messing things up" ;-)
Since I don't have the option of "docking" the HP laptop does anyone have the magic command/option to boot into safe mode so I can attempt to reset the display to a simple single screen?
Update the Control Panel is also accessible via WinKey Y (shows some voice narrator options but the root control panel is also available from here. I've 'removed' the 2 different external displays it might have been confused about but after a reboot I'm still stuck with a black screen. I've also tried pressing via WinKey P to flip in/out of presentation mode with no luck.