Windows 7 - Black screen with cursor after cloning to SSD

Supawoo · December 19, 2018

Hey all,

Long time lurker. Finally created a user account here, and unfortunately my first post is for troubleshooting. I've searched the forum for this issue, there are plenty of similar issues, but none(that I could find) that are the same as what i'm running into on a friend's laptop.

Long story short, Older Lenovo B575-1450 Laptop, Windows 7 Pro, AMD E-450, 4 gigs DDR3, 320GB 5400RPM drive. My co-worker asked me if swapping to a SSD would help get a little more life out of the dated hardware, I agreed that it should help speed things up a bit. Grabbed a 250GB 860 Evo. Cloned the old drive to the Evo using WD's version of Acronis(using my own desktop of course). All went smooth. Popped the freshly cloned SSD into the laptop, boots up nice and quick, I select the user account from the logon screen, starts loading, then a black screen with only the cursor... Rebooted a few times for fun. Can't ctrl+alt+delete, can't spam Shift to get Sticky Keys, etc. I can move the cursor around on the black screen and that's about it. Before going to bed, I tried booting to safe mode, which worked just fine(pretty quickly at that with the new SSD) and let the system install the Evo's drivers. Let it reboot, still a black screen on normal login.

That's all the troubleshooting I had time for last night. I'm going to spend some time with it again tonight as I will actually have some free time. There are a few different things I plan on checking through Safe Mode - standard things such as drivers, give Window's troubleshooting a shot for fun, take a look at the event log, etc. I just wanted to see if anyone else had any specific ideas for me that I can try out when I dig into it again this evening.

TL;DR: Old Windows 7 laptop goes to black screen with cursor only when logging in after cloning to a SSD.

Thanks for your thoughts!

Radium_Angel · December 19, 2018

31 minutes ago, Supawoo said:

Thanks for your thoughts!

Ok, if it works under Safe mode, but not Normal Mode, then it's missing something (duh, right?)

When starting up, press the F8 to get the boot menu, and see if you can try "last known good profile" (or words to that effect)

Also, in safe mode, create a new user, and see if you can boot into that profile. If so, then copy over your friend's stuff to the new profile, and reboot, see what happens.

Report back on your findings