Blank Screen When Installing Windows

So recently, I was tasked with reinstalling windows on all of our spare PCs in the office. A few were some of our tech guys computers (some of which had linux on them). Most of the processes went as expected with the exception of the linux to windows conversion. After researching, I found there was an error/incompatibility with the Master Boot Record that Windows could not resolve, causing the screen to boot to blank after the “Setup is inspecting your computer’s hardware configuration” prompt stating the CD was checking the hardware.

The research on this issue was the most complicated part. To remedy this issue, I found you can dd the MBR within Linux (I’ll explain the process next). By clearing it out, Windows will reinstall the MBR on first load and the remaining install should complete as expected.

To reset the MBR, execute the following command (this may make your linux partition un-bootable, so if you need back into it, make sure to back up the data first). In my scenario, I was completing a full format and reinstall, so there was no need for data backup.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

If needed, you can create a bootable USB or CD-ROM with GParted, or a specific distro and execute that command from the shell.

Feel free to comment should you have any questions, but this will resolve many blank bootable screens that are caused by a corrupted/unreadable Master Boot Record.

Tags: dd, install, Linux, Master Boot Record, MBR, pro, professional, windows, xp

This entry was posted on April 24, 2009 at April 24, 2009 and is filed under Linux, Utilities, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.