Screen goes black, and can't boot into windows unless safe mode

Hey guys , ive been having an issue lately and im struggling to work through it. Brief history, screens started dropping to black and computer would stay on. No way to reset just had to hold power button down.

Fast forward to my attempts to fix, system restore from safe mode, start up repair... Neither worked, i originally formatted the hard drive and reinstalled windows results were thebsame problem. I was suggested maybe the hatd drive developed bad sectors or something so for 100 bucks i figured whatever. Bought a new western digital hard drive still no joy.

Hardware as follows
Dell mobo
Asus essence st xonar sound
Amd msi r9 290 graphics
Cant remember the make but 800 watt power supply
I7 2.3 w/ 8 gb of asus ram.

Should be noted this setup ran fine for years before.

It had been somewhat of a pain to get amd recent drivers installed in safe mode but as far as things go tonight all my drivers are up to date yet i can still only load up in safe mode. When starting normally i get my bios splash, windows logo then black. My keyboard is illuminated and its light come off and on during its attempts to start. I think it does three attempts at starting then goes to windows help or whatever, where i xan select recovery etc for me i go safe mode.

I need help lol, im at a loss and pretty frustrated, could my video card be on the fritz or my mobo? I just find it off that everything is fine in safe mode but no way will she boot normally.

I should mention when installed windows it would boot in and work good for about 3 minutes. No time to even install chrome or check driver versions.

Any helps appreciated

Elliott

Thanks for the reply Ken, i followed your instructions and when i ran the installer for amd drivers from july it said it could not install because they weren't digitally signed but the version of drivers i chose is the wqhl stuff so it should be good. I worked around that by going to video card in device manager and updated the driver by manually pointing it to the extracted drivers found in the amd folder.

Restarted to a balck screen so still no luck.

I had black screen issues a while age. I tried numerous driver updates and disabling various stuff to try to identify the problem. I also checked all cables. I even replaced my PSU, which can cause this problem, but the problem continued.

Embarrassingly to say, but I finally found out that it was the graphics card that simply needed re-seating by pulling it out and re-seating it a couple of times. I then did a clean graphics driver installation, which I don't think was needed. I think it was just the graphics card that needed re-seating.

All is good now. Maybe it is worth a try for you. Good luck. :)


PS: While you're re-seating your graphics card into the slot, re-seat the power cable to the card.

Tried that no luck either. Maybe a sledge hammer is the answer at this point!

Yes, safe mode is the only way i can run the thing. Should i use ddu again and ensure that windows update is off then try and run windows with a reboot and no drivers?