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Black Screen with mouse pointer at boot, no Ctrl-Alt-Del or Safe Mode - help!

All of a sudden, Vista fails to boot (it's apparently common - the Black Screen with Mouse Pointer issue, which comes up for me before I get to a logon screen). Ctrl-Alt-Del does nothing at this screen, nor any other key combo I can think of. One of my first thoughts was to run repair off the Vista CD, but Vista is on a brand spankin new Sata drive, and I haven't been able to find a sata driver for My NForce3 chipset on my MSI K8N Neo2-f mobo from which to 'load driver'. When I first installed Vista, I added the sata drive, whereas XP was running on my IDE drive. I had to start the Vista install from XP so it could access the Sata drive - booting to the Vista CD didn't work as I couldn't find any driver with which to access the Sata drive.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated! Thanks...(and, reinstalling Vista is pretty low on the list of feasible options, with 4 young kids and a busy job.....)
Specs:
Vista Home Premium
MSI K8N Neo2-F mobo
AMD Athlon64 3500+ Venice cpu
2GB PC2700 DDR
ATI Radeon X850 Pro AGP video
Soundblaster Audigy 2ZS pci sound card (disabled in Vista and using the onboard AC'97 sound because of a low volume issue in Vista with the Audigy card)
IDE drive is a Western Dig Caviar SE 120GB with 8MB cache
Sata drive is a Seagate 250GB Serial ATA with 16MB cache

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nobus

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atyar

ASKER

Well, I can't argue there that it wasn't "made for Vista" - but I've had Vista installed now for about 1 month and it's been working happily on all counts (drivers all around).

nobus

any comment on the first line?

atyar

ASKER

Oh - missed that, sorry. When I first googled the issue to see if I could find a fix, I found *many* identical complaints by people (Vista booting up to a black screen and a mouse pointer). Some people mention something about it being a 'minimal functionality' feature of Vista designed to thwart Vista pirate copies. My Vista is 100% legit - I bought it at a local computer shop - an OEM Vista Home Premium full version. Other people said they experience this black screen, but are able to Ctrl-Alt-Dlt and kill explorer.exe, then relaunch explorer.exe and move on. Ctrl-Alt-Dlt does nothing at my black screen, nor any other key combination. I even let it sit overnight at this screen last night, in case it was just some long delay in the boot process that it would eventually get past. When I woke up this morning, it was sitting at the very same black screen....

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nobus

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atyar

ASKER

Well, I still have XP working as before on the IDE drive, so we're not without a computer. At this point, as I'm not finding a solution, I'm looking into possibly ditching vista, if I can get it off without kebashing my XP install.....

I could run a repair install from the Vista DVD, but I haven't been able to find a working nforce3 sata driver to load while booting from the vista dvd - any ideas on that front?

nobus

maybe this helps : http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
so your XP works ok on the same setup? thenit is a driver problem, as you supposed

atyar

ASKER

well, unfortunately I've been to that page, and they don't list any nforce drivers prior to nforce4, and even then have publicly stated they aren't making an nforce3 driver for Vista.....

atyar

ASKER

ah well.....I killed Vista and got XP back to normal (recovery console, fixboot, fixmbr, format the vista sata drive).
Thanks for your efforts - guess I'll wait for Windows 7....

nobus

ok, sorry to be of no more help