Windows 10: 30-60 second black screen with cursor on boot

This has been happening ever since I upgraded to 10 about 2 weeks ago. I start the computer, 3 second ASUS logo, then windows 10 logo comes up and it loads for about 10-20 seconds, then I get a black screen with a cursor for 30-60 seconds, followed by another loading screen and finally the login screen. About the same boot time I had on 7 except for the long black screen. I can move the cursor around during the black screen, and it sometimes has the blue loading circle next to it.
I've tried disabling fast startup and my video drivers are up to date. Device manager doesn't show more than one display adapter, but it does show 4 monitors if I show hidden devices. My BenQ monitor in DVI-D and Generic PnP monitor, which is my TV plugged into the DVI-I port on my 770, and then a hidden copy of each of those. I usually have the TV off with display on my BenQ, but windows seems to think the BenQ is the second monitor, calling the TV the PC screen when I check windows key + P. I don't know if that's relevant or not, but it caused a problem during my win10 install (windows switched to the TV display mid-install.) I tried switching the display ports while booting up but I still had the black screen
Anyone have ideas? I've googled this quite a bit but can't find an answer, just similar problems

:)

 

30-60 second black screen with cursor on every boot

Hi Stephen,

Thank you for posting on Microsoft Community. I understand the inconvenience you are facing. I will certainly help you with this.

I suggest you to refer to the Black Screen during installation
section in the Wiki article byAndre Da Costa
in below link and check if it helps:

How to: Troubleshoot Common Setup and Stop Errors During Windows 10 Installation



Also refer to the information given by Sharath Srinavasa in the below given discussion thread and check if answers your query:

Black screen after upgrading to Windows 10



Hope this information helps. Please post back with the results, we will be glad to assist you further.

Thank you.

 

30-60 second black screen with cursor on every boot

Thanks for the links Parth, unfortunately neither of them helped.

The first link only mentions a black screen during windows installation, which I had, but fixed by unplugging my TV from my second display port. That is not the case with the black screen I get on boot.

The second link has information on disabling the on-board graphics chip, I also did that but it didn't fix my problem.

I'm hoping to find the cause of the multiple attempts to load dxgkrnl.sys during bootup after it's already been loaded because, unless that's something fairly common, I think it could be causing the black screen.

 

With multiple displays you will need to set which one will be seen as "1" the primary. You'll know when you have it set with the option to see the number displayed on each. Programs used for multiples are those like UltraMON used here and DisplayFusion where you have the advanced options as well for things like a different background on each monitor as well as what 10 now features the extended task bar option.

As for seeing the black screen for several second with cursor that's normal on the second system here and nothing actually to be worried about. It's when you don't see anything at all but a totally blank screen "Houston we have a problem!" something isn't going right.

As for setting 10 up the first best move is to simply unplug all but the primary display in order to see Windows set that automatically as the primary. Upon later detecting the other one or two you plug in those will then be detected as secondary. THe BenQ will then be seen as the primary with the tv as secondary. With the addition of a program like the two mentioned you will find that you have a lot more control over how they are set while you still want 10 to think the BenQ is the primary.

 

All clean installs, no upgrades. An Asus Aspire notebook is the only system I've installed it on where this happens. still trying to figure it out but i suspect it's a driver issue, hopefully soon to be resolved. GeForce is the graphics card and I've noticed they keep updating the win10 drivers every few days on the desktops i've installed on. would be nice to just use the i3 integrated HD graphics for this particular notebook instead. might look into how to do that

 

Thanks for the info Night Hawk, I managed to get the BenQ set as primary. My monitor situation was just what I thought to be the cause of this black screen, but booting with only one display still had it. Would there be any way to make the boot go faster? I've seen some videos of win10 booting without that black screen, not sure if they had SSDs or not, but I think it would be strange to have an operating system upgrade with slower boots for those without SSDs. I timed the black screen this time and it took 53 seconds. The desktop seems to take a little bit longer to load compared to 7 as well, meaning the windows 10 boot takes at least a minute longer than 7.

 

Check if r hard drive is fragmented and defrag it if it is. DON'T defrag if have an SSD. Smart Defrag and Defraggler are good free defragging programs. Antiviruses are notorious for causing black screens, so if defragging doesn't help, disable rs temporarily. Will the black screen still occur? If the AV is the cause, I'd say that should either get a new, faster HDD or SSD (SSDs are a little expensive) or get a lighter antivirus.

 

I defragged my harddrive, my OS is running on a Western Digital WD10EZEX 1TB 7200 RPM. I'm running Avast antivirus, should I have to uninstall it? I chose to disable the shields permanently and then rebooted, still had the black screen. This time I turned on boot logs
Everything loads except for
BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \SystemRoot\System32\drivers\dxgkrnl.sys
That appears 4 times in the log, along with one Avast message
BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \??\C:\Program Files\AVAST Software\Avast\ng\vbox\VBoxAswDrv.sys
I'm not sure if that avast message is related to me disabling the shields or not

Could these be related to long boot times? I think that dxgkrnl.sys might have something to do with my dxdiag crashing, which opesn up this message
"DxDiag has detected that there might have been a problem accessing DirectShow the last time this program was used. Would you like to bypass DirectShow this time?"

I just tried sfc/scannow in the command prompt, it told me that the system files were fine. I'm not too sure how to reinstall DirectX, the installer from microsoft's website says it's up to date.


Edit:
I've found a thread on eightforums of someone with the same dxgkrnl.sys problem, load fails 4 times. Reading through the thread, I realized that we have the exact same problem, dxgkrnl loads properly the first time, then tries loading another 4 times. He also got a 40 second black screen, but never found a fix. He mentions multiple registries for dxgkrnl.sys on the last page, I wonder if it's safe to delete the extras?
Here's what I got in RegScanner
https://i.imgur.com/srLuO7c.png
8/17 is when I upgraded to 10

 

I could say one thing here fast enough! DUMP AVAST?! Besides Avast not being as light on resources as a few other AV softwares I could point you to the dxgkrnl.sys problem is getting back to basics with NVidia as the usual culprit and not limited to 10, 8.1, 8, 7, Vista but the entire ancholata! Here's an SF BSOD thread where someone was running into that one while already booted up and running video or following a system restart and in the case seen on the SF thread a used video card on the way out! BSOD - Windows 7 x64 nvlddmkm.sys + dxgkrnl.sys + dxgmms1.sys Solved - Windows 7 Help Forums

The second item is related to disabling something in Avast and you are running into the boot error log for that while the video driver issue may be hardware related.

 

Thanks for the link, Night Hawk. I followed the instructions in that post, wiped video drivers and reinstalled them, but couldn't reinstall DirectX. The installer gave me the same "up to date" message it did before. Still a black screen, checked the boot logs and dxgkrnl.sys failed to load 4 times. I'll put my log in pastebin so you can see. One successful load and then 4 failed ones
8 30 2015 00:12:02.494 BOOTLOG_LOADED \SystemRoot\system32\ntoskrnl.exe BOOTLO - Pastebin.com

 

I have to ask this one in regards to any additional flash drives if the 10 media is on one or do you have an external hard drive or other type of usb devices plugged in while this is all happening? If so those will also need to be unplugged as well during the installation to prevent mishaps which will tend to lean on seeing a black or blank screen remain without the mouse cursor even appearing forcing a hard boot. *Sad Been there enough times!

With 10 however it seems to be something normal to expect if you have anything extra plugged in when going to see an upgrade or fresh full install of 10 go on. If your onboard graphics chip is on the way out this type of problem would even more prevalent since everything displayed would be seeing some type of distortion most likely.

One thing just seen to here was a complete drive wipe nuking everything on the laptop and 10 automatically found and installed drivers for every hardware detected which would be what the laptop came with. With previous versions even 7 before 8 and 8.1 you always had to go for broke on looking up driver sets for anything additional added on while 10 even found and installed the 64bit 7 driver for a tv tuner/capture card on the desktop here. It couldn't be anything newer since the model was discontinued before 8 was even out!

The stalls seen with blank screens or errors were traced back by way of reviewing the clean install guide of having the two storage drives plugged and easily remedied. In your situation looking up any 10 driver updates at the manufacturer's support site along with temporarily dumping the Avast install for a day or so long enough to debug the startup issue would be a thought. That will either confirm or rule out that Avast has any part in the problem while the lean is still towards the video driver issue.

 

I appreciate your help, Night Hawk. I tried uninstalling Avast and booting, still a black screen, but this time I got a grey screen for about 3 seconds before windows started loading the login screen. Not too sure what that's about. The boot log still shows \??\C:\Program Files\AVAST Software\Avast\ng\vbox\VBoxAswDrv.sys not being loaded properly, along with the 4 dxgkrnl.sys
I do have a USB drive with windows 10 on it, but it's not plugged in. I have 3 internal harddrives, no externals.

I believe the problem may be with the dxgkrnl.sys files trying to load 4 times after already being properly loaded. I've seen posts of 2 other people with the exact same 30-60 second black screen with a cursor on boot, both of them have the same dxgkrnl.sys file loading an extra 4 times. The Avast VBoxAswDrv.sys might have something to do with it as well.
Does Windows use the registry to load these things on boot? Would removing some of the registry entries stop windows from trying to load it more than once? I'll try looking for that VboxAswDrv.sys file in the registry a little later

 

Since I have a paid for license of Avast AIS until 02/2017 I am not going to dump it. It also has not caused me any issues. As for the Black Screens, I have had them since I began using Preview build and that was without Avast.

 

Is is the same kind of black screen as me? 30-60 seconds with a cursor every startup. If it is, can you check if something isn't loading properly in your bootlogs? I'm thinking it has something to do with dxgkrnl.sys but I'm not sure yet

Edit:
I deleted the Avast registry keys relating to VboxAswDrv and now it doesn't show up as a failed load in my boot log, but I don't want to try anything with dxgkrnl.sys keys unless I really know what I'm deleting.

 

??? My reference to Avast wouldn't have anything to do with you to start with since the advice was for ilg3 and the problems he is experiencing.

Did you try installing Avast on a vhd you attached in the Disk Management for a dual or multiboot project? Virtual Box generally use a vhd with the "vmc" three digit file extension. That would account for the unexplained boot entries. The problems with the dxgkrnl.sys or Direct X installation driver could well suggest something trying to install DX11 or earlier which will automatic fail on 10! Keeping a usb WiFi adapter plugged in on a second machine also seeing a 10/7 dual boot but 10 connected by ethernet while 7 requires the usb adapter presents an error prompt each start up upon reaching the desktop since 10 continues to search for a network type driver for adapter which can't be found until Cisco comes out with 10 drivers for their Linksys products.

Likewise I am under the impression that 10 as it connects during start up is looking for a driver that may not have gone on fully as it should have for the video card you have there. One idea would be going to the manufacturer's support site for the AMD/ATI or NVidia update if any for 10 or for 8 or 8.1 to see what is available along with any uninstaller they offer. Those are intended to clean up any registry entries left over when updating from one version to the next of the driver set/application that goes on when you get the full package.

With the uninstaller cleanup tool download removing the present video set and running the tool in order to see the next newer update go on might just see the boot logs clreared up since the offending reg values will have been removed. Apparently 10 is playing XP with you! since back in XP days this was a common issue! You had to clean up the registry all too often or run into this type of problem!