If your screen stays black or is skewed after a restart, either the video device is not resetting correctly during the restart or the video is sharing an IRQ.
Turn the power off and restart it. If the video works, you will probably need to turn the power off each time you restart Windows NT. This problem is video- and system-BIOS related.
If the video is still wrong after shutting the power down and restarting, check for IRQ and memory conflicts with other cards on your system. If you are using a PCI-based computer, make certain that the video is not using IRQs 2, 9, or 12.
If you have installed a new video driver, or changed the display type by using the Display option in Control Panel, you might have created an incompatibility between the driver and the video device. One way that you can tell you have a problem is if you get a black screen instead of the logon message when you restart Windows NT.
You can turn off your computer or use the reset button to restart your computer. Then select the Last Known Good configuration. This recovery method is described in "Troubleshooting by Using the Last Known Good Configuration," presented earlier in this chapter.
On x86-based computers, you have another way to recover. When you install Windows NT, it creates two paths to the Windows NT folder, such as:
scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation Version 4.00"
scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation Version 4.00 [VGA mode]" /basevideo
If you select the path with the VGA mode option, Windows NT starts up by using the standard VGA driver. You can then use the Display option to reconfigure your video device.
Note
Windows NT version 4.0 requires new video and printer drivers. Windows NT version 3.51 drivers for these devices will not work correctly when you are running Windows NT version 4.0.