AMD display driver crashes after power outage

[hans030390]

This just started up today. It started when I was looking through some pictures and running Photoshop earlier today. Computer froze up, then the screen went blank. Came back with the AMD display driver crash message and said it had restarted.

I'm not sure why this started happening all of a sudden. I tried switching to the latest 11.10 drivers, but no luck. It seemed to make it better, but the problem is still there. I was on the 11.10 Preview 3 when it started, and it had been stable for a long while. Prior to changing to the latest drivers, it would crash whenever I tried to run any application that used the GPU (except Windows Explorer?). After changing, it seems to occur at random.

The only thing I can think of is that there were 4 random, short power outages that occurred at my place over the past 12 hours or so. My computer was on when 3 of those happened, I believe. Maybe 4. Not sure. Would that have anything to do with it?

 

[Daedalus685]

Those issues are Timeout Detection and Recovery in windows triggering. It is supposed to prevent a total computer crash in the case of a GPU hardware issue. However, as has been evident with the latest Nvidia bugs and past AMD ones it doesn't always work very well.

Nonetheless, first thing to check is if your overclock is still ok as an unstable overclock will certainly cause this, 90% of my issues with it are with what seemed stable overclocks in most games not actually being 100%.

What kind of surge protection do you have on the machine? Damage to something (PSU, Motherboard, GPU, Fans) could also be the reason it started happening.

 

[hans030390]

No overclock on my 6870. I don't remember exactly what type of surge protector I have. It is not a skimpy one, though.

Problems with the PSU or motherboard also crossed my mind, but I would not know how to test either of those. I can at least swap out my 6870 with my 5770 to see if the problem persists.

 

[hans030390]

Well, I've tested every component I can think of. GPU, CPU, RAM, PSU (which was OCCT's CPU + GPU stress test combination). Everything checks out when it comes to stress testing.

Not sure what else it would be other than a software/driver issue, but that doesn't really explain why it randomly started occurring after no changes were made to my system.

 

[sandorski]

Run a Scan on the Hard Drive. Something may have been borked there.

 

[Daedalus685]

These issues can be infuriating to debug. Sandorski is right, even though his hockey team of preference would lead you to believe he couldn't ever be (all in good fun ).

The 3 random shut downs could have caused some corruption to something important (even though we aren't in 1990 anymore). Couldn't hurt to run check disk and some of the windows repair/scan tools that are an option when you boot from the cd.

I should point out that when I have had this issue it was the only symptom of a faulty GPU. Replacing the card entirely solved the problems, even without so much as re installing the drivers (identical 4870s). So passing a stress test does not mean that something isn't physically wrong, it just means it isn't totally borked .

 

[hans030390]

Yeah, I'll have to test my HDD next. It just seems like no matter what I do now, I can't get the issue to repeat itself...