The Bloog

What do you do when, all of a sudden, your computer’s monitor goes black and doesn’t turn back on? You can hear the computer still running as normal but you no longer see anything on screen… what then?

Well, let’s start at the beginning. For a while, the X-Fi Platinum sound card has been acting up, allowing me to use the headphones jack of the front panel just fine but not do the same via the digital out port that is connected to a sound system. From time to time I have to reinstall the sound card driver to restore the sound through the speakers. This time, I thought, I should also try reinstalling maybe the chipset drivers… maybe there is a conflict at that level. So I did. That’s when the screen went black and it remained so.

Intel’s chipset drivers setup must have caused some serious damage at the driver level, which caused something to interfere with the graphics drivers. It was late at night and I was just getting ready to watch a movie. This was definitely not the right time for trouble.

After giving it a couple of minutes to see if the screen would come back on after the setup program ended, nothing happened. Committed to get my Windows back, I first rebooted the system by pressing the Reset button on the case itself and attempted to load Vista in Safe Mode. No trouble there. Safe mode loaded as normal which let me know that the problem was indeed at a software/driver level rather than hardware related.

I restarted the computer from safe and let it load up normally. I could see everything on the screen until the very last step of the Windows boot process, right after login. But I could tell that the system was booting normally other than the fact that I couldn’t see it.

I knew that performing a System Restore which would restore the system state as it was before the installation of the chipset drivers will probably solve this problem. But how to launch System Restore when I couldn’t see anything on the screen? Simple: by using Remote Desktop. I fired up the laptop and logged in via Remote Desktop to the (faceless) desktop. I could do that because my system was already setup for Remote Desktop. Had it not been then I probably would have been in considerably bigger trouble.

Since the main system was already booted as normal, logging in via Remote Desktop was painless. I was able to launch System Restore, choose a restore point from minutes ago and let it do its thing. Once the restore process started, I was eventually logged out of Remote Desktop, so I couldn’t track the progress of it anymore. This was possibly the most stressful part, as I had to keep the faith up that it is indeed doing what it should be doing and that once it is done, the computer will restart and I will be able to actually see my desktop again. It took a few minutes of constantly checking the hard drive activity light to make sure it’s still restoring, but it did. The system restarted, Vista loaded, the desktop showed up and I was back in business.

The entire process took less than half an hour. So if you ever find yourself in such a situation, take a moment, breathe and try to be creative. Sometimes the solution may be simpler than you think.