x800 XT stop 0x000000EA on cold boot

[Cipher79]

I've googled this topic but can't find anyone else with the same problem. Most of the time video cards seem to throw this stop error during running, but I get it on a cold boot. I've had ATI cards for forever--7500 worked fine, then got a 9600 SE and had a different problem with that. On a cold boot I wouldn't get any errors but could not play games because they would tell me I didn't have Direct3D or DirectDraw, and dxdiag agreed. After rebooting it worked fine. I replaced that card with a x800 XT about two years ago, and it worked fine at first but then after a driver update started giving me this error. I think it's connected with the driver update, but I could be mistaken. At any rate no driver rollbacks I tried fixed it at that point.

My hard drive failed recently so I put in a new one and a clean install, and tried Catalyst 7.7 and drivers from 6/26/07 (oldest available on the ATI site), hoping to prevent this problem if it was caused by the newer drivers. At first it worked perfectly, but now I'm back to the same problem again. Another weird thing is the x800 XT is detected by the Windows hardware installer even though it is already installed. This also is not new, I had the same problem on my previous OS installation.

Any suggestions that don't involve steps that would decrease my video card performance? Since I just have to reboot my computer on a hard boot, I'll tolerate this if fixing it would kill my video performance.

I have:

Pentium 4 2.00 GHz
1 GB RAM
Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2

If you need more information let me know.

 

[mactronix]

HI Cipher79,

The error means this, "000000ea = "THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER" - A device driver is spinning in an infinite loop, most likely waiting for hardware to become idle. This usually indicates problem with the hardware itself, or with the device driver programming the hardware incorrectly. In many cases this is the result of a bad video card or a bad display driver."

What i would suggest is a complete uninstall then reinstall of your video drivers this will help http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&questionID=1447

Mactronix

 

[Cipher79]

Since this problem has persisted through multiple driver upgrades, downgrades, and a complete format and reinstallation of everything, I doubted that would help. But I haven't tried the new Catalyst yet so I uninstalled and reinstalled this morning and got the same results: Stop error on cold boot.

 

[mactronix]

Other possables would be defective memory, either the actual card memory or possably your system ram. Try running Memtest on your system memory and see if that yeilds any faults. Other than that we are looking at trying to borroe anothercard from somewhere to try and rule out th ecard being faulty. One other thing, do you have all the latest updates ? specifically the .net updates.

Mactronix