Windows won’t boot. Black screen with blinking cursor at the corner.

February 29th, 2012 etdot

Ever run into a Windows system which won’t boot and instead just sits at a black screen with a blinking cursor forever? I have. Especially when the Windows system is a guest operating system in Microsoft Hyper-V. And frequently if that guest OS was recently converted from a VMWare Server or VMWare ESX Server vmdk to vhd. Well, after lots of searching I stumbled upon the solution:

  1. Boot the guest OS off of the appropriate Windows CD (mount ISO is also an option).
  2. Go to the recovery options.
  3. Open the command prompt.
  4. Type the command:
    bcdedit
  5. You should see the windows boot manager in one partition and the loader in another one.
    1. If that is the case, then type the following commands and then reboot the guest:
      bootrec /fixmbr
      bootrec /fixboot
    2. If that is not the case, try the following command and reboot the guest:
      bcdboot C:\Windows

Thanks to Felipe Binotto’s Blog post which contained the original solution.

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22 Responses to “Windows won’t boot. Black screen with blinking cursor at the corner.”

  1. petrixx says:
    March 19, 2013 at 9:11 am

    Tnx for your post it save my echange VM.

    Reply
  2. bootoffav says:
    December 29, 2013 at 9:35 pm

    Thanks for help, it worked for me.

    Reply
  3. miked says:
    January 18, 2014 at 11:14 pm

    ty worked for me

    Reply
  4. Bruno says:
    June 24, 2014 at 12:56 pm

    Thanks, dude!
    I have installed a Windows 7 in a VM (Hyper V) and not booted.
    Your tip helped me to fix it!

    Reply
  5. joe says:
    June 28, 2014 at 1:23 am

    Thanks Dude,
    now the converting from virtualbox to hyper-v is complete.

    Reply
  6. Thnks says:
    August 15, 2014 at 3:56 pm

    Thanks

    http://www.atlantaitservice.com/cms/techtips/boot-issues-with-windows-7

    Reply
  7. Liron says:
    September 2, 2014 at 2:39 pm

    Works like a charm!

    well done!

    Reply
  8. prisen says:
    November 28, 2014 at 2:04 am

    Thanks for the tips it work fine for me

    Reply
  9. l3tsputasmileonthatfacexd says:
    March 8, 2015 at 3:23 pm

    Old post but still worked for me thanks.

    Reply
  10. SIS says:
    July 9, 2015 at 3:03 pm

    Thanks for the tip.
    Worked, saved me a few hours work!

    Reply
  11. Raul Zepeda says:
    July 31, 2015 at 3:08 pm

    Had Vmware Fusion and it seems that a snapshot corrupted my system. After applying option 2 the system booted.

    Thanks Options 2 worked for me. BCD

    Reply
  12. FredHilbert says:
    April 18, 2016 at 7:29 pm

    Thank you. Your post save my day.

    Reply
  13. Ranga says:
    April 24, 2016 at 5:18 am

    Appriciated your effort

    Reply
  14. Hunter1st says:
    August 9, 2016 at 10:29 am

    THX for the todo, it works fine.

    Reply
  15. Rahul Raj says:
    October 2, 2016 at 11:07 pm

    Thanks brother ..thanks a lot

    Reply
  16. gabrial says:
    November 3, 2016 at 2:38 am

    hi,

    am new to this stuffs. actually, what does first step mean? ( Boot the guest OS off of the appropriate Windows CD (mount ISO is also an option). )

    Reply
    • Administrator says:
      November 16, 2016 at 10:04 am

      Insert physical Windows CD into CDRom of host to appear in virtual CDRom in guest.
      OR
      If you have ISO (electronic copy, say, downloaded from MSDN) of Windows CD, you can mount this ISO file directly from the Hyper-V interface and it will appear to guest as virtual CDRom.

      Reply
  17. Chris Allen Barroso says:
    April 10, 2017 at 1:22 pm

    Tks, Its work for me too.

    Reply
  18. Tato says:
    August 10, 2017 at 9:16 pm

    You save me. Thanks…

    Reply
  19. Das Krishna says:
    September 12, 2017 at 3:10 am

    LIFESAVER!!!! Worked and SOLVED My problem

    Reply
  20. Victor says:
    March 14, 2018 at 12:17 am

    Thanks brother, with worked great after a Vmware -> HyperV conversion with acronis.

    Its weird since i tried using the wizard to repair the MBR but only the command from prompt worked.

    Great post!

    Reply
  21. Rogers says:
    April 20, 2018 at 4:26 pm

    Works

    Reply

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