'White Vertical Lines on Orange Screen' Screen of Death

Brad P

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I have never seen a screen like this in the 20 years I've had my own computer.

I had Windows 8 on a secondary drive as a dual boot with Windows 7 temporarily as I migrated to Windows 8. I somehow messed up either the boot loader or somehow corrupted the Win8 install for which I'll skip the details for now. But it was just as I was starting to decommission my Win7 install (I removed one drive from the 2-drive mirror running Win7 but figuring the single disk left would still run in a 'degraded' status. It ended up messing something up.).

I've been running bootrec /fixmbr, fixboot, scanos, and rebuildBCD from my Win8 USB stick and it says it completed but no luck on booting. I get either 0xc0000001 or 0xc000021a errors. Auto repair can't fix it.

I tried running this command, "bcdboot c:\windows /s c:", and got the screen shown in the attachment. White vertical lines on an orange background.

The only drives connected is the Win8 SSD sata drive and a DVD drive on IDE. I disconnected the DVD drive and the Win8 flash screen would appear with the circular dots but would freeze right there.

I don't have logs or screenshots to show but the single partition on the SSD is marked as active via diskpart (no system reserve partition), bcdedit shows c:\windows as the default location of the OS, diskpart shows the partition as c:, but the DVD drive is disk0, and the SSD is disk 1. Would that be a problem?

It is like it can't find the winload.exe file but I verified it exists.

Any help is appreciated.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 7 Ultimate
Have you tried putting the removed drive back in?

It looks like a video card problem (hardware) to me - but it shouldn't be that because you're able to use the USB Startup Repair functions (am I right in this assumption?). That means (to me) that it's likely to be a video driver problem (?).

Can you attempt to boot into Safe Mode? If so, what happens?
Does the screen problem show up after POST is completed? If so, at what point does it show up?
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Win8.1Pro - Finally!!!
    Computer type
    Laptop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Samsung/NP780
    CPU
    Came with the laptop (i7 of some sort)
    Motherboard
    Pretty sure that it has one, but haven't checked inside the case!
    Memory
    upgraded to 12 gB from 8 gB
    Graphics Card(s)
    has switchable - Intel/ATI - Used wrong drivers, now ATI card is inop :( Will have to fix it soon!
    Sound Card
    I'm nearly deaf, so this isn't used often
    Monitor(s) Displays
    Touchscreen on laptop/32" Toshiba on HDMI (laid the Sharp TV on a mouse and cracked the screen!)
    Screen Resolution
    800x600
    Hard Drives
    One Samsung 1tB drive - 5400 rpm. Gonna switch to a 7200/10000 rpm or an SSD (if I can find $500 for a 1tB SSD!)
    - Switched to 500 gB Samsung 840 series SSD - WOW!!!
    PSU
    Why do we ask this for laptops?
    Case
    Silver with a neat Samsung logo
    Cooling
    sub-par, gotta get around to working on it soon Worked on it - still sub-par! :(
    Keyboard
    Microsoft Natural - the same one I've used since it orignally came out around 1995
    Mouse
    no Mouse - Trackball!!!!
    Internet Speed
    too slow when I'm waiting for a download to finish
    Browser
    Yes, I use this (Firefox mostly, w/IE next most)
    Antivirus
    Windows Defender and Windows Firewall
    Other Info
    I'm handsome and a snappy dresser :0)
After messing around with it some more, I determined that the drive was somehow locked, that all the folders and files were locked and not even readable. When I had the Win8 SSD hooked up and Win7 booted, the drive was not available, access denied. I could access the boot folder, but that was it.

So I gave up, and with only the SSD and the IDE DVD-RW drive connected, tried a Refresh from recovery and actually was able to boot into Win 8 minus a mini dump. But the C drive was still locked and I could not access any files. I could not take ownership as my account lost admin rights. So I just reinstalled Windows 8, deleted the single partition on the SSD and recreated it and Win8 created a system partition that it never had before (as it was a secondary drive dual booting with Win7).

It all started when I removed one of the two hard drives in the RAID1 array that had Windows 7 on it. Despite booting on a degraded array in the past, prior Win8 on a secondary drive, it somehow messed up the boot loader and started a chain reaction of some sort.

Live and learn I guess. I still don't know why that screen came up. But it just seemed to be a one-off occurrence.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 7 Ultimate
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