Jordan Savant // Software Architect

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Windows Update KB5087051 caused a Black Screen of Death

When I installed a (forced) Windows update on May 20th, 2026 it ultimately devolved into a completely broken installation which booted into a black screen with no interactivity or display at all. This is my story and how I resolved it (for now) and hopefully it can help someone as well.

This PC and TV specs:

  • Windows 11 Home
  • Gigabyte Motherboard
  • Nvidia Geforce 4070 TI
  • Intel CPU
  • NvME Solid State Drive
  • 4k Roku TV at 60hz via HDMI

Black Screen Arrives

Windows has been periodically dropping updates that have been problematic for many users over the last several months. I was fortunate to not experience those on my desktop PC I primarily used for gaming and hobby development. Unfortunately this changed on May 22, 2026.

An update was released by Microsoft and my options at shutdown included:

  • Update and Restart
  • Update and Shut Down

I was done for the session and intended to move my PC to another room on next usage so I opted to "Update and Shut Down."

I moved the PC and booted it the next day and ran some software and some games (Old School Runescape) for a session. While playing the game I noticed it would sometimes flicker to a black screen. This concerned me and I thoought perhaps the graphics card may be going out or the HDMI cable but mostly assumed this older game had some graphical glitches. Then after a couple of hours the following issues arose.

  1. My game went black.
  2. It came back and was a very low resolution, 1024x768 if I was lucky.
  3. I closed the game and went into Display Settings.
  4. Changed resolution to 4k.
  5. Display settings reverted to 30hz (30 fps).
  6. I went into Advanced Display Settings and set it to 60hz.
  7. Computer forced resolution to 1920x1080.
  8. I changed it to 4k again and again 30hz and setting to 60hz went back to 1080p.
  9. I tried 59hz and it went to 1280x1152 (what?!)
  10. I went into Advanced and now it had 20 different hz options..

At this point I knew the entire graphics system was bugged. About a week prior I had updated the NVidia drivers so I went to look for a new update and it had one.

I installed the new NVidia drivers while operatinga at 1080p and when it reached the point in installation that usually caused a screen flicker the display went off and never came back.

Out of paranoia to not interrupt the NVidia process I let it run for half an hour with no graphical output and then force rebooted the PC.

When it rebooted, BIOS menu appeared as usual but after BIOS the computer went straight to a solid black display with no interactivity.

First Debugging Attempts

My first assumptions were that either the graphics card was going out or that the HDMI connection was faulty or that RAM faults were causing Windows to fail to boot or that Windows was failing to boot due to its own issues.

I booted to BIOS and had full keyboard and mouse interactivity in the Gigabyte menu and ultimately concluded that it was not a graphics card issue since this worked without any issue.

Also, since the boot to black screen was consistent I ranked RAM issues as a low likelihood since memory faults generally caused erratic and unpredictable crashes when certain addresses of memory become corrupted at random points.

This led me to issues with Windows startup being the culprit.

Windows Recovery Mode

I needed to try and get Windows to boot into "Recovery Mode" which would give some tooling to try and resolve the issue. Online suggestions included force rebooting 4 times while Windows is launching to have it launch into recovery mode automatically. This did not work or if it did I was unable to see it work since it was a black screen.

From there I moved to a second Windows Laptop we had in the house and created a USB drive with Windows Recovery installed:

  1. Control Panel > Search "Recovery" > Create a recovery Drive
  2. This launched Windows Recovery Drive software.
  3. I had the USB in the laptop.
  4. I unchecked "Back up system files to recovery drive."
  5. It then reformatted and installed windows recovery into the USB.

Back to the busted PC I went and loaded into the BIOS/Boot Menu and selected the USB to launch into and it brought up Windows Recovery! This was a second confirmation that the graphics card or hardware were not an issue.

Windows Repair Failure

My first attempt was to try the build in Windows repair utility. After letting it run for a bit it resulted in:

Your device couldn't be repaired at this time

---

Click (or select Enter) for more recovery options.

Log file: C:\WINDOWS/System32\Logfiles\Srt\SrtTrail.txt

Great, so this clearly did not work. Given I had little access to the actual Windows installation I did not know the contents of that log file until later but for those that are curious it was:

Startup Repair diagnosis and repair log
---------------------------
Number of repair attempts: 1

Session details
---------------------------
System Disk = 
Windows directory = C:\WINDOWS
AutoChk Run = 0
Number of root causes = 0

Test Performed: 
---------------------------
Name: Start network for cloud remediation
Result: Completed successfully. Error code =  0x0
Time taken = 14782 ms

Test Performed: 
---------------------------
Name: Detect remediation via cloud plugins
Result: Completed successfully. Error code =  0x0
Time taken = 1750 ms

---------------------------
---------------------------

Windows CMD Integry Scan Failure

My second attempt was to run a system verification on core files using a CMD line utlity. I found these debugging suggestions online and with AI suggestions.

I rebooted back into Recovery Mode and went into Troubleshooting > Advanced Tools > Command Line.

I first ran a verification process command:

sfc /verifyonly

This resulted in

Windows Resource Protection found integrity violations...

I then ran the repair with:

sfc /scannow

This resulted int

Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files and successfully repaired them.

Progress! I rebooted and it went straight back into Black Screen... failure.

Windows Recovery Uninstall Recent Update

At this stage I was mostly suspicious of the recent Windows Update so I rebooted into Recovery mode and attempted the process for rolling back the most recent update.

I was asked if I should rollback the most recent "Quality Update" or "Feature Update." I assumed since it was a minor update it was a "Quality Update" and ran the utility to do so.

After a while it resulted in a "Successfully uninstalled update."

I rebooted and it went straight to Black Screen of Death... failure.

Windows CMD Safe Mode

Very frustrated I booted again into recovery and back into the command line utility to force Windows to boot into Safe mode. From command line:

bcdedit /set {default} safeboot minimal

Now bdedit is a command-line tool for managing BCD - the Boot Configuration Data (BCD) files. These files provide a store that is used to describe boot applications and boot application settings. The command-line tool can be used for a variety of purposes, including creating new stores, modifying existing stores, and adding boot menu options.

In my case I was modifying the default boot menu option to launch it into "minimal" safeboot which loads only the minimal drivers, no network, no startup applications, and no visual effects.

Upon reboot into safe mode Windows booted successfully!!!

So at this point I was confident that something went haywire with the most recent Windows update causing an issue with the graphics drivers.

Uninstalling Windows Graphics Drivers

First thing I did was uninstall the Windows drivers that were likely installed in place of the NVidia drivers to try and ensure it would not boot to black screen again.

Device Manager > Display Adapters > NVIDIA Geforce > Right Click > "Uninstall Device" and checked "Attempt to remove the driver for the device."

This did its thing succcessfully. But to avoid the drivers being installed again I needed to rollback Windows properly.

Uninstalling Recent Windows Update

I had to open the CMD line again and run the following command to get a list of recently installed windows updates so I could roll back:

wmic qfe list brief /format:table

This produced a text table of the recent drivers in roughly this format:

Description         HotFixID        InstalledOn

Update              KB5087051       5/20/2026
Update              KB5054156       2/19/2026
Security Update     KB5083769       5/23/2026
Security Update     KB5092762       5/14/2026

There at the top was the likely culprit and corresponded with the most recent update I installed. (It was not until writing this that I noticed the first Security Update as the most recent on 5/23 which was actually a day in the future since these bugs occurred on 5/22 unless it was in UTC just after midnight time.)

This listing also showed that the Windows Recovery utility did not rollback and "quality update."

I ran the next command to uninstall the problematic update KB5087051

wusa /uninstall /kb:5087051

I then backed out the boot from safemode by running

bcdedit /deletevalue {default} safeboot

I attempted a full reboot and when it came back Windows was functioning correctly!

Preventing It

I am ultimatley unsure if this problem will not just appear again in the future but to attempt to try and remove I did the following two things:

  1. I paused all Windows Update with an "Extend for 4 weeks" which will at least prevent Windows from trying to update the PC until nearly July 2026.
  2. I disabled Windows from installing graphics drivers over my NVidia ones. Start > Device Installation Settings > Select "No (your device might not work as expected)" > Save.

Time will tell if this will result in a permanent solution but ultimately this was another major push to migrate my entertainment PC over to Linux full time.