Windows 8 Upg black screen temp fix for PD8 (UPDATE: now 100% working) Just spent a few hours attempting to fix a black screen in Windows 8 upgrade (x64 RTM) on PD8, finally rectified but not 100% perfectly. Hope this helps some other people - surprisingly Im still in a good mood. Here's what I did... - Started off with a PD8 machine running an activated copy of Windows 7 32bit on a new slim IMac - Purchased the 24.99 upgrade edition of Windows 8 on a different Windows 7 64bit machine and upgraded PD8 Windows 7 32bit to Windows 8 64bit. So far so good. - In stalled 'Start8' - forget Windows update, this is more important. - Screen had black bars down each side due to missing driver support via Parallels Tools. - Installed Parallels Tools, during the installation the screen flickered and black bars disappeared (assume this is P.Tools installing some graphics driver or equivalent). - Rebooted the Windows 8 VM. This is where I got the issue... - Typed in my password at the login screen, then before the start menu appeared the screen went black. Could not shutdown the machine cleanly so had to stop the VM. Here's what I did... - Tried the following boot line 'devices.video.pci_device_id=0×5005;' - this didnt do anything, i.e. same black screen. - Tried a few other ideas like rebooting in safe mode and removing the 'generic monitor' under PC Settings > Devices - this didn't help. - Tried rebooting IMac, that didn't help. Eventually I did the following... - Bashed F8 when loading Windows (same button as Play/Pause on mac so had to mute speakers!). - Follow the Windows boot menus until you get to the one for system restore. - Luckily P.Tools created a restore point before it installed, I clicked that and waited a couple of mins for it to restore. - Rebooted - the screen STILL came up blank after logging into windows. - I then rebooted, bashed F8 and entered Windows 8 Safe Mode. - The 'Start 8' start menu didnt load so had to navigate to PC Settings > Devices using the 'Charms' bar on the right screen edge. - Once in devices I removed the 'generic monitor' device (top of the list). The entry for 'generic monitor' didnt actually disappear, but it seemed to do the trick. - Rebooted Windows 8 to 'non-safe (dangerous?) mode'. - The desktop appeared after logging in, but obviously there were no P.Tools (due to system restore) and the monitor had the vertical black bars again. - Downloaded 20(0) Windows updates...actually had a beer instead. I then tried installing P.Tools again, got the same error and ended up repeating most of the above steps again... If anyone can see anything obvious that I'm doing wrong please let me know as I currently don't have any of the benefits of P.Tools like file drag/drop, Apple apps in Windows etc. Once again I hope this helps someone. Now that I've cleared my system (Mac and brain) I can get on with normal life ;-) rgds Matt
All sorted - turns out all I had to do is be patient...although it was about 10 minutes. At the Black screen the Windows CMD window will appear (after 2 or 3 mins) and Apple CPU usage uses 1 core 100%. Eventually the desktop appears with Parallels Tools installed and screen resolution set to max (no black bars each side). Once again, hope this helps someone! (On a side note - Parallels, please upgrade your forum registration form as the amount of spam on here is huge!) rgds, Matt
