Issue with 8800 GTS drivers and Vista 32 blank screen

[martybauer31]

So I had a couple of events yesterday with my PC....

Playing COD4 and it locked up on me (not unusual) and I had to hit th restart button to get out of it. Upon reboot, Vista wants to do a checkdisk, which hangs up multiple times in varying places. I skip the check and try to boot into SafeMode which boots to a blank screen, I try booting to safe mode with command prompt, it hangs on me....

I finally start thinking I have an issue with my RAM, I pull one stick out, and get a MEM failure during the check disk. Pull that stick out and put in the other one, and boom, the check disk finishes and I start to boot, all is good right? Wrong....

It now boots, but then I get the blank screen again. I finally end up just reinstalling the OS, I put all my software updates back on and all is good. I then go to load the Nvidia drivers I had (169.25) and about 3/4 of the way through, my whole screen goes blank again and won't come back. I reboot the PC and go the the last known good option and things come back up.

Why all of a sudden am I having these problems? The PC is as clean as it's been in a long time, I ran these drivers for over a week with zero issues and all of a sudden I can't even load it without the screen going blank?

Anyone have any ideas? Did I maybe pick up an update for Vista that doesn't like the Nvidia drivers? I am admittedly afraid to test with another version of driver as I don't want to see the same thing happen and waste my time reloading an OS.

If anyone has a fix or suggestion, I am all for it.

Running the following:

Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3
C2D 4300
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320 GB HD
G. Skill DDR2 800 (now at 1GB for the moment)
XCLIO 500W power
EVGA GeForce 8800GTS 320MB

Thanks for the help,

Marty

 

[Err0r404]

1. confirm HD is fine with HD Diagnostic tools, hopefully Seagate have it available online.

2. Vista is buggy imo, I had numerious troubles with 8800GT drivers. And 169.25 is beta release so expect just that. I had similar trouble, when you install Nvidia Drivers, it hangs SO long that people think it crashed, and they hit the reset button...when infact it hasn't and when you restart your computer and roll back, your driver files are incomplete/corrupted and some people stuck on this loop. I seroiusly went to sleep when my computer shut off the monitor while installing the driver and when i woke up (after 1hr+ nap) the computer screen is back on without any problem and smiling with new drivers.

3. Microsoft KB got hot fixes for SLI fix, Memory Leaks and Pagefiles updates, you need those and make sure you let it run it's driver installation on its own if you are going to try it this time, go watch a movie and come back after 1-2hr.

4. Make sure you ram timings are okay. relax them alittle to 5-5-5-15 or so if you want to make sure it isn't contributing to it.

 

[drjman]

In the earlier versions of Vista (rc1 pre-rc) i had a weird problem when installing vista drivers. I would get the same black screen but found out that nvida was trying to display through the second dvi out on my card! Crazy. I found out by plugging in another monitor and voila! when the screen went black it came back on the other monitor. I then changed the primary display back to the other monitor, disabled the secondary and restarted. Everything worked fine. It took me a while to figure it out and i cursed vista a bit.

 

[martybauer31]

Thanks for the advice guys, I appreciate it!