Black Screen on Windows 8.1 Upgrade

[Jordan]

So, I have got yet another brand new laptop. Some of the specs are as follows: 16gb ram, 17.3 inch touch screen, Intel i7, 2.40 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GT 740M 2GB Graphics card.

Anyhow, the lucky bastard as I am, got the computer technically free (for now). The laptop was originaly my step fathers. He had bought it during the past summer because he thought he was going away with his work (He works in the mines). Turns out he didnt need to. Never used. So he gave me it recently and said I can pay for it whenever I want as well as giving me $600 off the original price (originally $1,500 so now I will be paying $900 for it... Eventually )

Anyhow, so it's a brand new computer. Used once to put anti virus software on it, possible twice just to tweak some settings. Yesterday as I turned it on to make it "mine" add some personality and stuff to it, it worked like a charm. Very beautiful laptop. No problems arose.

However, today when I came on I got that Windows pop that says to upgrade to Windows 8.1 for free. I said sure why not (I have never done so with any of my other computers or even the one I'm typing on now). So I let it do its thing. It restarts a couple times before finally just restarting for one last time and giving me a black screen. I can boot it up, turn it on, but nothing appears. Just a black screen. As if it had no video driver at all or the screen was not connected. Because of this you can not even access the bios menu or start up in safe mode.

I'm just wondering if anyone has ever had this problem when upgrading to Windows 8.1. I have read many documents on trying to fix this issue, most of them say you need to have the recovery disk or CD. Sadly as the computer came with Windows 8 installed on the hardware itself, it does not come with, nor do I own a copy of the Windows 8 CD or Windows 8.1 CD. I can upgrade any of my other computers to Windows 8.1 and then make a CD off that and use it, but why would I want to do that once I just seen what happened to this brand new laptop xD

Anyhow, what are your thoughts and opinions and as this ever happened to you. If so, how did you solve it?

 

[Martee]

Well I didn't have this exact problem but when I updated to Windows 8.1 it did something to my hard-drive and locked the partition so I basically couldn't boot and access my documents and stuff so I ended having to loose anything I hadn't backed up. And this happened twice and both times were when I was updating to 8.1.

I'm currently on 8.1 now though and thank the Lord it works fine. I would just re-format and reinstall W8 (not 8.1) so you have a CD for W8 itself and re-try getting 8.1. At least you'll have a W8 disc to revert to then.

 

[Jordan]

I don't have a Windows 8 Disk xD The laptop came with Windows 8 installed and like every other laptop when you buy, they don't give you the Windows CD xD

 

[Martee]

Surely you can make a recov CD from your W8 lol? I just use ISO's myself from the web so I can't help you there. XD

 

[Jerlene]

First see if it's a hardware issue by getting a VGA and monitor and hooking it up to your laptop. Let me know if the screen is black on that as well.

 

[Jordan]

First see if it's a hardware issue by getting a VGA and monitor and hooking it up to your laptop. Let me know if the screen is black on that as well.

Ha ha trust me, tried that as well. nothing would show up on any external monitors as well. Either way, I have the manufacturer sending me a new laptop anyhow now. Pickup should be here Monday.

 

[Jordan]

Finally got my laptop back WHOOOT!

 

[Collin]

Sorry to bump this thread, but this post was very interesting.

I have a computer that I custom built, with RAM maxed out, and a terabyte hard drive. I currently have Windows 7 on it. One day, I found a sale where Windows 8 was only like $38 when it came out. I found the sale on Slickdeals and couldn't resist. So I bought it, and decided to dual boot my computer, allowing me to choose whether I want 7 or 8. Most of you would ask why I would do such a thing, and it's mainly because I had a lot of software that I didn't want to risk migrating. I had PhotoShop, Professional music producing software, professional video software (After Effects), 3D Modeling Software (Autodesk Inventor), etc. I wanted to keep all of that so I decided to create another partition. Everything went fine after the installation. I was running it for months already.

Then Windows 8.1 decided to roll out. It should have been Windows 8.0.0.0.0.0.0.1 Beta, and never released. I saw the popup, and I was like hey, why not. So I let it have it's little dance party, and the computer was acting weird like Jordan said. Except mine was worse. I honestly wish I had a black screen instead of the issues I had.

When the computer restarted, I got an error at boot. "NTLDR is missing." .........F**K. I broke out Hiren's Boot CD (Or as I like to call it - The CD of Doom), and found a small software that fixed the issue.

Or so it seemed. Now I had messages like "Windows did not boot correctly" and "No operating system found", and I even got the stupid "NTDLR is missing".

Then it kept getting worse. Then I was getting the "Blue Screen of Death", restarts on its own, and even raw error code data when I turned on the computer. (00x000399da01 00x038957326za0 etc etc etc)

"Hell, this is a virus," I thought. It all came down to me getting Windows 7 only to work. After digging through the hard drive files, it turned out that the upgrade basically copied the Windows 7 partition and overwrote a whole bunch of system files it wasn't supposed to mess with.

And what sucks even worse, is that it broke my activation on Windows 7, and I can't find the product key anywhere (I knew I should have put that sticker on the computer.)

So now I'm back where I started, before 8, and even worse. I can't even have a custom desktop background, because Windows will try to validate every 15 minutes, and after finding out it can't validate, it destroys the background.