I recently had a Windows black screen of death, where it basically instead of loading into Windows, it goes to a black screen where the only think I can do is move my mouse. I can't bring up task manager or msconfig or anything that I've tried. I've since loaded Windows 7 onto a new hard drive, which allows me to see the files on my old drive, but when I go play GOG games that were installed on that drive, it gives me no option to load my saved games. Scanning my old drive with virus checkers turned up nothing of importance. While I was trying to repair that drive, I did manage to boot from it once and I was able to load my games as normal, so I know my data is still there, I'm just not sure how to access it. For instance, I can't even find where the save data for Wasteland 2 is even supposed to be located. I thought the drive was fixed, but unfortunately the next time I tried to boot into Windows, it was back to a black screen and there was no longer a restore point when I went to repair. Any help would be appreciated.

If anyone's help does lead to a solution to the black screen of death, then I will give them my gift copies of The Witcher, Torchlight, and Dungeon Keeper Gold if they want them. If that goes unsolved, but someone is able to help me to get my GOG games to load my save data, then they can pick one.

PCGamingWiki is a good source of info for GOG games and it contains the info of their save locations. Here is the info for Wasteland 2.

Thanks, so my save files are there, but how do I get WL2 to allow me to load them? Copying the save files to the same location as the WL2 exe file doesn't change anything.

You have to transfer them at the same path in your new drive. It will help you to start a new game to generate the save folder and then copy your old save files (overwrite/replace) in place of the new ones.

I really had to facepalm after trying to figure out how to get it to work on that drive, but copying it to the new drive and matching the same file location of the saves did the job, thanks. I'm still interested in figuring out if anyone has a good solution to the black screen of death.

Yes... Unplug your computer....

I guarantee you won't get the black screen of death...

Does the same thing happen when you boot in safe mode?

Yup.

Sounds like a dead drive. For drive failures in the past I've used the R-Studio recovery tools. They aren't free, but considering what my data is worth to me it's around $80 very well spent. A black screen that allows mouse movement could also be a graphics card failure. Condolences, and I hope it all works out.

I tend to take the nuclear option when dealing with argumentative hard drives. You obviously have some spare hardware and know your way around a computer, so you may have already tried all this. Sorry in advance if these suggestions are useless to you.

If you have a system restore disk (and if you don't, I bet you will from now on) then you can try a system refresh or restore.

If you think based on boot behavior that you've lost the GUI but not the system, you can try booting from a removable drive. If that works to get you some graphics, you could again try the system restore or roll back to a previous save point (or whatever the term is Microsoft uses for driver and patch rollback).

If you think you have badly corrupted boot or system information,you could try to re-partition and reformat the drive. Obviously you'd need to get a fresh copy of Windows ready to install. Microsoft might be willing to help,or if you work in IT, you may have some helpful tools at work.

If you think youve lost the boot sector but you have not heard the click of death, then you might have just lost magnetics. Download something like Darik's Boot And Nuke (DBAN), set it to do a full write at least half a dozen times, then go to bed or work or whatever - DBAN takes a long damn time. I have had drives lose boot sectors and even lose magnetism, but work again for months or years after running DBAN, which is fundamentally a low-level format (aka zero-fill) run a bunch of times. I just jump to DBAN most times because I crack eggshells with a sledgehammer.

Clearly, for pretty much any of those options except the system refresh/reatore, you would want to slave your borked drive back up and copy over anything you are going to want to save.

I'm a network nerd, not a desktop support nerd, so if any or all of those suggestions sound staggeringly stupid, please ignore them and pretend I said something smart,instead.

By having two drives plugged in, I can boot off the 2nd drive and see my files on the first. If it were a hardware failure, then I think I wouldn't be able to do that.

If your boot drive is corrupted, most of the data on the drive will be visible but you still may not be able to boot. Depends on where the data corruption is localized. If you lost registry information, for example, your machine may hang on boot but saved files may still be perfectly fine. Drives don't die all at once, they do it in bits and bytes - you may have a bad block that is making the disk fail on boot, but an external scan can step past it and recover all of the remaining data. Hard to say without being there to mess around with it.

Or it could be a simple data corruption. Either way, if you can still see the drive you're lucky! Get everything backed up off of it ASAP.

I tried doing a system restore, but it gave me some unspecified error and wouldn't go through, but when it reset, it booted to windows so I thought it had somehow been fixed anyway. The problem is that the next time I booted it, it went back to black and it no longer lists any restore points when I try to restore again. I'm kicking myself for not disabling almost everything that happens on startup when I had the chance. The fact that I was able to boot from it once makes me wonder if it was a problem with the boot sector. From my understanding, it's the black screen of death is either cause by bad drivers or malware, but my scans weren't able to detect it. At this point, I'm thinking about sifting through and copying what I want to keep, then formatting the drive, though some programs don't like being copied to a different location and I risk losing something I missed, so I'm trying to fix it instead. Also, I tried Kaspersky Recovery Tool and booted from a USB port, but none of the things that were suggested to me to check to fix in the registry appeared to have any problems.

When I have a boot failure like that, heck, any type of hard drive failure, I always do the same thing to correct it. I buy a new hard drive, install the OS from scratch, hook my old HD up to an external enclosure and grab whatever files I can. Then thank God for what I was able to retrieve.

If a HD starts flipping out on me, I will no longer trust it for anything. These types of things, even the small ones, tend to cascade and avalanche into larger more permanent problems. Backup whatever you can, and toss the drive. You don't want to take a chance in trusting it again.