Black Screen on Setup?

[extramoose]

Trying to make a kiosk style netbook.

Can someone please help me why I'm greeted with a black screen after fikes loaded to the drive? OOBE? It installs files to the dusk fine, then black screens for oobe I believe.

 

[Hellbovine]

This preset says you're only removing 3 drivers, adding 2 registry tweaks, and some minor unattended stuff. Based on what's provided, the solution is probably to not remove some combination of those drivers. Alternatively, you may be using an already modified image, and in that case we either need a full preset showing all the tweaking done to the image, or you need to download a new, official ISO from Microsoft's servers and start over.

 

[xRHINO]

Got another black screen from a fresh enterprise windows 10 ltsc, thanks for the quick reply. I hope I'm not bugging anyone but here's the present I think I uploaded the wrong preset earlier

 

[Hellbovine]

That preset has over 800 removals (Lite preset has around 400 for comparison). Once someone reaches that level of tweaking it really just boils down to testing in layers (link) and undoing the most recent layer when a problem is encountered, such as a black screen. It's not practical for outsiders to troubleshoot these kinds of presets, unless the person doing it has a lot of time or happens to already know the general problem, but the latter diminishes as the amount of removals grows and it typically becomes a guessing game due to the excessive variables.

Black screens tend to be driver related, so try an image without any driver (.inf) removals and see how that goes. Otherwise, more information would be helpful to the guys here that like to troubleshoot presets. Did this preset come from somewhere, such as GamerOS with more added to it or was it fully custom by you? If it's custom, please explain how you've built it--was it put together in one go and now you're testing it all at once or do you have other layers you can compare this one to? For example, compare this preset with the last known working one and see which removals/tweaks are new, because those will be the culprit and by narrowing down the search field we can more easily find the problem.

 

[xRHINO]

I run a laptop as a kiosk and use enterprise for server just because of the ram also doubles as a video editing offline machine. 128gb ram.

Made the preset myself everything was going well until the drivers, ironically the hardware support was A-ok as well as the rest.

I'll double down and try each category until I find the culprit.

Didn't know if one of the forum experts would know right away or if we're all sort of trial and erroring.

I appreciate the detailed replys.

 

[Hellbovine]

Okay, so it does sound like a driver. There's no secret to this though, it's mostly just literal guess and check, which is why it's easier to build an image by tweaking in layers or small batches, rather than adding too much at once. People can use their tweaking knowledge to further narrow down the list of culprits to make the trial and error go faster, but putting it all together the steps below are basically how to efficiently troubleshoot this scenario, and there's really no difference between a veteran and even a newbie in the outcome, except for time spent:

Spoiler: click here to reveal text

1) We hypothesize that drivers are the likely culprit, so make a copy of your preset then right-click the file and edit it. Find the component removal section, indentified by the <c></c> lines. Every item between those pieces of XML code are all items that NTLite will display in the "Components" section and will uninstall them from an image when the user processes it in NTLite. Select all components inside the preset file and delete those lines, except for all the drivers. Save and exit, then load this preset in NTLite and make a new image with it. We now have a new image with only drivers being uninstalled. Go install this new image and see if Windows still fails, and if it does then we confirmed our problem is a driver removal. If the problem doesn't appear, then our hypothesis needs to be reassessed.

2) After identifying drivers as the issue, we now have a "layer" to focus on. From here we can use our tweaking knowledge to try to make educated guesses and delete a few suspect drivers at a time, making a new image and installing it to test afterwards, until we find the culprit. Alternatively, if there's too many drivers or we don't know enough about them, then delete batches of them at a time, such as 10 or 20 drivers each, making a new image to test afterwards, until one of the images is successful. Once you've found a working image, backtrack slightly and start narrowing in on the last 10 or 20 culprits until you find the 1 or 2 actually causing the problem.

That's the core of what experts are doing when they troubleshoot an NTLite preset (XML file), and if someone isn't trying to solve problems with this approach (or by using the Quality Control guide from the previous link), they are likely spending more time on things than they need to and could become more efficient by changing tactics. Aside from that, it's just tips and tricks users gain along the way from hands-on experience.