The Black Screen of Death!!!!!!

I had a VM that whenever you tried to access the console or RDP into the server it just displayed a black screen as shown below

You could do a ctrl-alt-del and if you tabbed just right, and it was a big if, you could log into the server. Once logged in the server functioned correctly. Well I did the standard Google searches and checked out Microsoft’s knowledgebase but had no luck. I knew it must have something to do with the default profile as that is the one that is loaded before a user logs on.

So how do you fix this issue?

Once you are actually logged on to the server, load RegEdit and navigate to “HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Colors”.

All the colours have defaulted to 0 0 0  this is Black, so the server had a black background, black text entry boxes, black text, black buttons etc.

How was this caused?

According to Microsoft this was caused by the system drive running out of space. This makes complete sense as my system drive had run out of space, my disk space issue was caused by a miss configured App-V installation, my fault,  I stupidly placed the content directory on the C:\, then managed to fill up the drive, with sequenced application packages. Oh well lesson learnt.   I created a new drive and set that up as the content share and moved the packages out.

Now to correct the issue

Navigate to the following regkey “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Colors” key, this happens to be profile colour setting of the currently logged on user.

Select File/Export

And save it as a *.reg file to the desktop,

Load this up in notepad and change the following line:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Colors]

To read

[HKEY_USERS\.Default\Control Panel\Colors]

Save the file.

Next double click the .reg file

And click Yes

If you are successful you will receive the following message. Click OK.

Now log off and your console will now be back to normal

Panic over.