Black Screen on Boot Scan

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

2 weeks ago I bought a new PC and only today I tried out the boot scan feature of avast.
When the PC restarted I could tell it was processing something but the screen was black. From time to time, the monitor would auto-adjust himself but the screen remained black. I then tried to quit the boot scan by pressing ESC and it worked.
When I finnaly logged in my user account I went to my avast directory to check the log files and it was indeed doing a boot scan!
I’ve read another thread where this problem was discussed and someone (sorry I can’t remember :P) said to look into C:\Boot.Ini which was hidden by default and search for a /nogui entry. As you can see further on, there’s no such entry on my boot.ini but still I can’t see the avast boot scan GUI. I can see the windows logo and all the other stuff though.

Can someone help me out?

BOOT.INI:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=“Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

EDIT: I’m running Windows XP Home Edition SP2

2

My first thought is that your monitor can’t handle the resolution of the boot scanner. Is your monitor a wide screen or do you have it at a really high resolution? you may want to try setting it at 800x600 and see if that changes anything, if it doesn’t then you can rule out the resolution problem.

3

I too am having this same issue. Black screen during boot scan. Can check the log and see that it is actually working.
Anyone with ideas.
Thanks,
V

4

Forgot to mention that I did try to manipulate the resolution to no avail.

5

What about the standard Windows chkdsk utility?

Go to My Computer, right click the system partition, select Properties, go to the Tools page, click Check Now, check the “Automatically fix file system errors” box and click Start. A message box pops up, saying it will do the check during next reboot. Confirm with OK, then reboot the machine and verify if the chkdsk GUI is displayed properly or not.

Thanks
Vlk

6

Nope, that didn’t show either. Something is up. I do have alot of Windows default services shut down, maybe I better look through those and see if there are some dependencies I missed that could be affecting it.

Thanks for the idea though.

V

7

Isnt’t there another boot.ini file in the root directory of any other drive (partition)?
This problem really is usually caused by the /NOGUIBOOT option.

Thanks
Vlk

8

Thanks Vlk I think I found it. Went into msconfig on the boot.ini tab and sure enough I had /noguiboot checked. Thanks alot.

V