BootAble and SpinRite 6.1 Boot to a Black Screen

[bhall]

Howdy!

I created bootable USB drives with BootAble and another one with SpinRite 6.1. I disabled Secure Boot and enabled CSM on my ASRock B650E PG RIPTIDE WIFI ATX AM5 motherboard. I'm able to select the bootable USB drives from the boot menu on startup, but when I select either of them, it just goes to a black screen, and no combination of key presses (except CTRL+ALT+DEL) does anything. Am I stuck with a UEFI-only machine, and will I just need to hold out until SpinRite 7?

Thanks!

 

[DanR]

If UEFI was the issue, neither of those BIOS boot USB drives would be recognized.

I'm thinking you have SpinRite 6.1 Release 3 on both drives?

If so, the problem is very likely an unnecessary DOWNSIZE line in the Config.SYS file.

You can fix this by editing Config.SYS (it is a small simple text file) using Notepad, to remove the DOWNSIZE line. Save the edited config.SYS and reboot.

Steve is aware of this and will have it fixed in Release 4.

 

[PHolder]

created bootable USB drives with BootAble

This should not be hanging at a black screen. Unlike what Dan suggested above, it should not be doing anything but showing you a message. It seems likely there is some issue with your video support on your BIOS. @Steve would need to comment more here.

 

[Scott]

In addition to @DanR ‘s advice, I’d edit the config.sys to REM out the splash screen, and edit autoexec.bat to REM the SpinRite line. See if you get to (and can see) the Dos prompt.

 

[bhall]

Yep, I'm using SpinRite 6.1 Release 3. I see no CONFIG.SYS nor an AUTOEXEC.BAT (man, I haven't touched those two files since the 1990's
)

Here's what shows up on my SpinRite bootable USB drive:

 

[Scott]

Yep, I'm using SpinRite 6.1 Release 3. I see no CONFIG.SYS nor an AUTOEXEC.BAT (man, I haven't touched those two files since the 1990's
)

Here's what shows up on my SpinRite bootable USB drive:

View attachment 1216

They are hidden but there, do dir /ah to see them, or play with windows explorer settings to see hidden and system files

 

[bhall]

I may have found an edge case with a strange combination of hardware. I performed the following steps one at a time, trying a reboot after each step:

• Deleted the DOWNSIZE line in CONFIG.SYS,
• Deleted the splash screen line in CONFIG.SYS, and
• REM'ed out the SPINRITE line from AUTOEXEC.BAT

Nothing. No prompt, no SpinRite, just a blank, black screen.

 

[bhall]

AUTOEXEC.BAT:

@ECHO OFF
PATH=\
rem SPINRITE

CONFIG.SYS:

SWITCHES=/E /N
LASTDRIVE=Z
BUFFERS=99
NUMLOCK=OFF
IDLEHALT=1

 

[PHolder]

found an edge case

If you're not even launching SpinRite, and you're getting the black screen, guess what, it's not SpinRite's fault, but FreeDOS's fault. DOS doesn't run well on every piece of hardware unfortunately. It relies on the BIOS of the machine to do certain things in certain ways.

One thing to check/consider: Does the machine have more than one way to output video? (Perhaps it is inbuilt, for example, on the CPU as well as having a GPU.) Perhaps the video is just going to the wrong place? (There may, or may not, be settings in your BIOS to play with if this is the case.) In theory I guess you could find a DOS version of the REBOOT command, put it on the USB beside SpinRite and then blindly type REBOOT at the black screen, hope you type it correctly, and notice if the machine acts like it rebooted. This would confirm, at least, that it's not completely hung.

 

[DanR]

There has been very rare cases where the presence of the extraneous DOWNSIZE line in Config.SYS actively interfered with SpinRite running properly.

This was not one of them. It does indeed look like a FreeDos compatibility issue with this hardware.

 

[ColbyBouma]

I have the same problem on my new laptop. It's definitely booting into FreeDOS, but I can't see anything.

https://forums.grc.com/threads/chuwi-gemibook-xpro-no-video.1443/

 

[bhall]

Thanks all for the suggestions. I must have an unlucky hardware combination that FreeDOS isn't compatible with. I get the same black screen upon boot on both my discrete graphics card and the on-board video display.