Is Your Windows 10 Booting Up to a Black Screen? Here is How to Tackle it

Vikas Medhekar Windows, Windows 10

If your Windows 10 installations boots up to a black screen, that can be due to two main reasons.

  1. Your Fast Boot image is corrupted.
  2. Your display driver is corrupted.

Let’s see, how we can fix the above issues.

The first thing that you can do is to give it some time for your PC to get out from the black screen. It might take 5-10 minutes to get you to the login screen/desktop. Be patient and wait. In case you can log in to your PC clean it up from too much junk. Use ST Cleaner to clean it.

Go for System Cleaning

ST Cleaner follows Google software principles

If you’re not seeing any difference even after waiting, then you can try this option.

  • If you can get to the Login screen

  1. Check connections to external devices
    1. If you have several external devices plugged in, remove all and try plugging them in one at a time. This way you can identify which device is problematic.
    2. Sometimes, additional hard disks can also cause this problem. It is better if you can detach additional hard disks when you’re doing this.
  2. Safe mode
    1. When you come to the login screen, Select the Power button while holding the Shift key. Then Click Restart.
    2. When your PC is restarted, you’ll be prompted to the recovery screen. On that screen, select Troubleshoot → Advanced Options → Startup settings → Restart
    3. When your PC restarts, you’ll see a number of options. Press F5 to select Safe Mode with networking.
    4. Once your PC is started in Safe Mode, you can try either of the following options.
      1. Uninstall the display driver
        1. Open the Device Manager and locate your Display Device
        2. Right click on it and click Uninstall.
      2. Turn off Fast Boot.
        1. Control Panel → Power Options
        2. Click Choose what the power buttons do
        3. Click Change settings that are currently unavailable
        4. Under Shutdown settings, disable Fast Startup
    5. Microsoft also suggests disabling RunOnce processes and services, in order to fix this black screen issue.
      1. Get the Task Manager
      2. Check Processes and Services tabs for any instances of RunOnce.exe or RunOnce32.exe.
      3. If there are any, click End Process in the Processes tab and Disable them in the Services tab.
    6. Then restart your PC.

  • If your login screen never appears

    1. Check connections to the external display
      1. Try connecting your display to different available output ports. Sometimes, changes in the drivers can cause the output to be transmitted to a different display port.
      2. Try changing the projection mode by pressing Win Key + P and trying out different combinations.
        1. Press Win Key + P → Press P again and hit Enter.
        2. Repeat the above step
    2. Safe mode
      1. Since you can’t have the login screen, you can’t get into the Safe Mode directly. So you’re going to need either a Recovery Disk/USB or an Installation Disk/USB.
      2. Boot your PC with the bootable disk/USB you got in the above step.
      3. On the Windows Setup screen, select Repair your computer option. If you’re not seeing this screen, your PC didn’t boot up from the bootable media you inserted, and check your PC manufacturer’s website for more info on how to boot from a secondary media.
      4. On the next screen, select Troubleshoot. Then you can select the Safe Mode. Select Advanced Options > Startup Settings > Restart.
      5. Now you can continue the same steps from iii) in the Safe mode section of “If you can get to the Login screen”
      6. Disconnect the installation media and restart the PC after all the steps.