can you ctrl+alt delete at the black screen?

i feel like this happened to me in 7 once or twice.

also try unplugging your monitor and checking if its a graphics driver issue which it probably is.

I can't ctrl-alt-delete, it's just black. I've tried plugging into the onboard graphics and booting into safe mode, same result. I'm fairly certain it's deeper than the graphics drivers.

Oh I meant to say -

I5-4670k, asus mobo, don't remember model, evga 660ti, win 8.1 on a corsair 128gb ssd

Edit - also, using the windows disk I can enter the repair screen, and once every 10 tries it does it on its own as "windows failed to boot". Like I said, though, anything I would normally do out of it doesn't help.

sounds like an advanced elevated mainframe collapse with a severity of about 0.2342. call ur local wal-mart and give them this info and they will be able to tell u exactly what to do

source: im an engineer

Before this happened, had your monitor ever got stuck on a (maybe discoloured) frame and eventually gone to black? Do you see a blinking cursor for several seconds on your black screen at any point after POST but before boot?

1. Have you tried a cold reboot? Preferably by disconnecting the power cord after shutdown.
2. The monitor is definitely working (just to make sure)?
3. What do you mean you can't ctrl-alt-delete? Did your keyboard go black aswell?
4. Yes, you can do a clean install and keep the data on the other drives. If you disconnected them there's no way you could mess up and delete anything.
5. Since you get to the repair screen try a repair.
6. If there's no important data on the SSD or if you have another pc at hand to copy it, then fuck troubleshooting and just do a fresh install. It's not worth spending more time on troubleshooting than it would take to reinstall all programs and copy the data.

Slightly off topic:
This is why you keep backups, people. Also partitions are your friend. One just for windows and another for programs etc. on the SSD. I even moved appdata to that partition. I don't have to redo all settings, it's all there after a reinstall. Even better with backups of the windows partition I can nuke it whenever I feel like it and don't have to do anything if I haven't installed any new programs since the last backup.
Btw both HDDs and SSDs can and will die. You will most likely not see it coming. Especially SSDs can go from fine to dead from one boot to the next. Far more annoying is when they start silently messing with your data. Either way if you don't have backups, data will be lost.

tl;dr
BACKUPS!

Well... I dunno what i did differently. I was cold rebooting, which I've done like half a dozen times already, to make a video and show you guys what was going on... And that ONE time it decided to scan and repair my C: drive. So yeah, anyone who comes into this thread to troubleshoot, sorry, not entirely sure what my solution was. I've cold booted, run chkdsk's and bootrec's, and tried system restores (that apparently took hold a day later????). Sorry.

Nope, that never happened. I had some issues when I opened my case; I think I messed up my GPU's seating, but I fixed that pretty easily. This specific problem never had that happen.

@Setsul:

1. I tried that, and as I just said, this 6th or whatever time worked. Who knows.
2. Yes, it was. I was going to point out in the video that the light indicated it exited power saving mode and turned blue.
3. After the boot screen, it just went black where the password screen would normally show. I'd tried ctrl-alt-delete but there was no visible response.
4. Good to know, thanks.
5. I tried refreshing, resetting and the automatic repair. The first two said the drive was locked. The latter did nothing.
6. Yeah, this was probably my last option. Thankfully I didn't need it.

Thanks for the help though, guys.

The reason I ask is because I had a drive(HDD, not SSD) which refused to boot dozens of times after my monitor froze on a discoloured and distorted frame, sometimes it would go to black and sometimes it would go to WinRepair. Eventually it booted, I formatted it and reinstalled Windows and it was fine for another few months, then the same thing happened and happened again a few months after that. Eventually it turned out the problem was that an LBA(a sector on the drive) was broken in an unfortunate place. Every time the C drive would get full enough to reach that sector again, it would refuse to boot. I ran a utility program made by the manufacturer and it found out this fact for me and marked it as broken; the drive then just doesn't write to that sector any more and essentially skips it in favour of an undamaged sector. This was 7 or 8 years ago, but the drive is still happily purring away as my secondary storage to this day without any problems since then.

TL;DR If this happens again, try to find a tool which allows you to check for damaged sectors. A long shot, but might save you buying a new drive(though I guess with an SSD this might indicate that it's starting to break).

While what you said is correct newer HDDs (newer as in not 8 years old) do that automatically.
Also if a SSD slows down drastically DO NOT REBOOT. Do a S.M.A.R.T. test or copy your data right away just to be sure. Good SSDs slow down on purpose before they are dying. Ideally they would enter read-only mode. It means that controller thinks it can not guarantee the SSD's life much longer so it limits the writes which are the main cause of failure. By slowing down or disabling writes it gives you a chance to back up your data before it runs out of sectors to reallocate the failed ones to. Why shouldn't you reboot? Well the hardcore method of preventing SSD failure with partial data loss or returning bad data is for example found in Intel's consumer SSDs: After they have reached said point they will brick themselves on the next reboot. That way you'll never get bad data or a situation where the SSD can't write what it was supposed to write, but if you didn't know about that behaviour beforehand and have no backups, everything is gone.