Windows 7 black screen - Nvidia 7600 GS

[bhatti47]

Hi All,

I installed Windows 7 on my desktop 2 days back and came across a problem. As soon as the installation rebooted the machine, I got a black screen with mouse cursor and it stayed like that for hours. Initially I thought that there could be some problem in the installation and so I formatted my disks again and reinstalled the OS. This time too I faced same problem.

I looked through some of the forums and people spoke about taking out all the on-board cards and then installing Windows 7. I started by taking my graphics card off, Nvidia 7600 GS AGP -> PNY make, and as soon as I took it out to use my onboard graphics Windows booted properly.

Just to try again, I re-connected my graphics card and tried booting the machine which made it crash. For next few restarts it did not boot, even when I removed the gfx card. Finally, I had to use my Win 7 DVD and repair the installation. System started working again but without my GFX card.

I tried looking through several forums for this problem but did not find any solution. Can somebody tell me how do I reslove this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Anurag

 

[Gandalf]

You might have a bad card.
Is it under warranty?

 

[bhatti47]

No, card is working fine. It works perfectly under Win XP, problem only came up when I installed Win 7.

BTW, can any1 tell me how do i update bios for a graphics card; or if it can be done. I will try that and see if it works.

 

[Gandalf]

Your BIOS is part of your motherboard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS
You might want to check with your motherboard manufacturer to see if it has an upgrade.

Can you boot into your Safe mode (F8) with the Video card installed?

 

[mi1ez]

Can you boot into the BIOS with your card installed and set to use onboard whilst having the card connected so that you can install drivers?

 

[mi1ez]

Your BIOS is part of your motherboard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS
You might want to check with your motherboard manufacturer to see if it has an upgrade.

Can you boot into your Safe mode (F8) with the Video card installed?

Graphics card also has BIOS. Not that it's relavent to this thread.

 

[bhatti47]

Yayyy.. finally I got my card working!

The problem was that my onboard and Nvidia cards were both working at the same time and had created two seperate displays. Onboard card was set as the main display in windows while my monitor was set to display Nvidia display. When I got the blank screen with cursor initially, my windows was working but everything was being displayed on the other display (onbaord one) which was not directed to the monitor.

Just to try, I typed in my password on the blank screen and surprisingly it logged me into windows which showed me just my wallpaper and few gadgets on Nvidia display. I tweaked some display settings, disabled other display & onboard gfx and my sytem works perfectly now.

Thanks for all you suggestions.