Problems after an install of video drivers.(How do I diagnose?)

[dave_d]

Hi all,

So my problem now is that I installed new drivers (latest AMD drivers for my 6850 video card.) and it's given me *** bit of an issue. When I start up my computer it goes through some start up screens but eventually locks up at *** black screen.(By locks up I mean that the hard drive stops doing anything and neither do the keyboard and mouse.)

So any ideas what some steps to fix this would be? I've tried booting in safe mode and that's no good. (It locks up at the same point.) I did *** quick scan of my hard drive with the hitachi disk diagnostic tools and they didn't report anything. I can boot it with my Ubuntu boot disk and I can see the hard drives fine from there. I saw something on the Windows boot disk about "install drivers", any idea how I'd use that to install say plain old VGA drivers and see if that works? (One other idea I was thinking of was swapping out the video card with an old one and hope that skips whatever video card driver issues.) If anybody knows any way of diagnosis this one please let me know.

 

[soundguruman]

what I would try is insert the win 7 installation disk, boot that disk start the computer...select "upgrade"
this will normally reload the operating system and default drivers
but it does not erase your files or programs.
Hopefully, this will get the machine into a useable state. It is certainly worth a try.

Another alternative is to install the hard drive as a second drive on a working computer.
You can then drag your files off the malfunctioning drive and make a backup.
Reformat the bad drive and make a fresh install, replace your files from the backup.
OR have a computer shop do it for you.

Now once you get the OS working again, first thing, back up all your files to a thumb drive or DVD.

To load the video drivers, turn off all the security and antivirus first. restart after loading drivers, then turn the security back on.

It is not uncommon for the operating system to be reloaded after making a major hardware change, because the hardware needs to be configured. To reload the OS use the "upgrade" option on the installation disk. This keeps your files from being wiped out.

 

[dave_d]

what I would try is insert the win 7 installation disk, boot that disk start the computer...select "upgrade"
this will normally reload the operating system and default drivers
but it does not erase your files or programs.
Hopefully, this will get the machine into a useable state. It is certainly worth a try.

Thanks for the help. I'll probably try this first. (Well ok, the first thing I did was run chkdsk /R on my hard drives. I'll try booting into them to see if that fixed anything.) Actually I may end up buying another hard drive and do a fresh install to it if this doesn't work.

 

[soundguruman]

Try the upgrade repair first before buying another drive.

 

[dave_d]

Try the upgrade repair first before buying another drive.

Actually I ended up just reinstalling Win7. I tried your advice but it said I had to log into Windows first before I could run the upgrade. (Which of course was impossible since I couldn't get in at all.) Thanks for ideas though. (I wished they worked since it was worth a shot and would have saved me alot of time reinstalling everything else.)