Windows 10 - Display driver nvlddmkm stopped working – Ubuntu ok

Player1001

Commendable
Jan 28, 2017
2
0
1,510
I know that this issue has been raised before but there is a difference in my case because the PC is dual boot and Ubuntu shows no problems. In Windows 10 the display hangs up, usually when playing Steam games, and the screen turns black; the PC continues to operate because I can continue to hear the music. The PC then has to be re-booted using the power switch and after this the event log has multiple occurrences of the warning ID 4101 ‘Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered’ with the last one being immediately prior to the hard re-boot. When I run the same Steam game under Ubuntu it runs with no problems.
My desktop system is:
• Motherboard: ASUS P5N-E SLI with chipset nForce 650i SLI
• Memory 4 GBytes DDR2
• BIOS: Phoenix Technologies 0703
• GPU: GTX460
• Operating system: Windows 10 (a legit ‘Home Full Version’ not a cheap OEM version)
• Security: Windows Defender and Windows Firewall
• OS – dual boot Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04
I have tried all the suggested ‘solutions’ which I have found on the net but none have worked:

• The power supply options were set to high performance.
• I have updated the graphics drivers several times to the most recent versions available on the NVIDIA web site and also the most recent versions available from Microsoft – I am currently on 372.90 provided by Windows (nb – on Ubuntu I am running 367.57). I have also tried reverting to an earlier version. I have tried fully uninstalling the NVIDIA drivers more than once using DDU and, on another occasion, Revo uninstaller and re-installing.
• Windows 10 has updated all other device drivers
• The NVIDIA control panel has been used to set the PhysX processor to the GPU and to change the 3D setting to ‘high performance’
• I have tried increasing TdrDelay to 8 and also setting TdrLevel to 0 as described in various places
• I have disabled Windows defender temporarily and also Windows firewall
• I installed MSI Afterburner and reduced the GPU clock speed and the memory clock speed by up to 200 MHz. I also checked the GPU temperature which did not go above 50 °C and it could be reduced to about 42°C by setting the fan speed to maximum – the graphics still hung-up (I was not expecting this to work because Ubuntu does not show any hardware problem)
• I used MALWARE Bytes to check that that Windows Defender had not missed a virus – it found no problems
• I have not updated the BIOS – I am reluctant to do this because if the system hangs in the middle of this operation I could be left with a brick which does not run Windows or Linux

I have run out of ideas and have gone back to using Ubuntu most of the time but I do want to continue to use Windows 10 (which I paid for!) but at the moment the system is too unstable – any assistance would be appreciated.


 

Rhinofart

Distinguished
Jan 30, 2006
977
0
19,360
the issue you are describing is classic Video Driver issues. Have you completely removed the graphics driver from windows, and rebooted so that it shows standard VGA in Device Manager? Once you are at that point, install the nVidia graphics driver again. You may have to do a couple of times until you find the graphics driver that works properly. Are there any bluescreens at all, or just black, and you have to hard reset?
 

Player1001

Commendable
Jan 28, 2017
2
0
1,510
Thanks for the suggestions - in order to be sure, I downloaded the latest NVIDIA driver 378.49 and removed the current (Microsoft supplied) graphics driver using DDU and re-booted the system into safe mode. The graphics had returned to VGA (Microsoft basic display adaptor) but Windows 10 immediately started to re-install its current approved driver and the NVIDIA control panel came up with an error to the effect that it could not install the new driver because the hardware wizard was running. DDU had alreadyswitched off automatic driver updates and I checked 'Device Installation Settings' to be sure that this I was on manual updates - despite this Windows 10 started an automatic driver installation each time I repeated DDU uninstall a couple more times. The only work around that I could find was to right click the display adaptor under device manager and ask it to uninstall the driver and also to click the remove software option in the dialog box (it didn't remove the software - the folders are still there). I then ran DDU again which still found an NVIDIA driver present and asked it to uninstall and again went into safe mode with VGA graphics. I was able to install the new NVIDIA driver but when I played a game this display hang up into a black screen after about 10 mins and I had to do a hard re-boot. I checked the event viewer and found that I had first had got an 'application blocked ...' error message followed by the familiar message 'Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding ....'.