New 7870 bluescreens on boot

[Otternaut]

I just purchased Gigabyte's version of the ATI Radeon 7870 and have been struggling for a few days not to try to get it operational. I'm running an EVGA P55 FTW motherboard and Win 7 x64 SP1.

When the only video card in the system attempting to boot windows safemode or otherwise will result in a bluescreen with a STOP 0x0000007B 0xFFFFF880009A97E8 0xFFFFFFFFC0000034 0x0000000000 0x0000000000 error.

Previously I was running 2 Geforce 275s in SLI configuration. I tried booting with one of the old cards and the new card, windows initially had a device error 10 on the 7870 but after installing the catalyst drivers it appeared to properly detect in device manager and will now display properly as a 7870.

The card still cannot be booted too however, any efforts to make the new card the primary continue to result in the bluescreen error listed above.

I know a 0x0000007B error is an inaccessible boot device and this is usually seem for hard drive errors, but in this case the video card is the only element being changed.

Any thoughts?

 

[bigcyco1]

Try using driver sweeper to remove all the drivers sometimes all don't get removed then reinstall

 

[Otternaut]

Did a complete removal of all existing drivers with drive sweeper in safe mode after uninstalling them as normal.
Attempted a boot under the new card and the error persists.

 

[bigcyco1]

Hmm...i have no clue bud hopefully others can help good luck!

 

[johnbl]

I just purchased Gigabyte's version of the ATI Radeon 7870 and have been struggling for a few days not to try to get it operational. I'm running an EVGA P55 FTW motherboard and Win 7 x64 SP1.

When the only video card in the system attempting to boot windows safemode or otherwise will result in a bluescreen with a STOP 0x0000007B 0xFFFFF880009A97E8 0xFFFFFFFFC0000034 0x0000000000 0x0000000000 error.

Previously I was running 2 Geforce 275s in SLI configuration. I tried booting with one of the old cards and the new card, windows initially had a device error 10 on the 7870 but after installing the catalyst drivers it appeared to properly detect in device manager and will now display properly as a 7870.

The card still cannot be booted too however, any efforts to make the new card the primary continue to result in the bluescreen error listed above.

I know a 0x0000007B error is an inaccessible boot device and this is usually seem for hard drive errors, but in this case the video card is the only element being changed.

Any thoughts?

When you changed your video card the motherboard BIOS detected the change and the DMI pool ( the information you BIOS keeps about your current hardware configuration) was changed.

if this is the case you need to tell your BIOS that you want your OS to handle your hardware configuration
look look for a BIOS setting that indicates that your OS is plug and play aware. Also, just in case
check to see that your IDE/AHCI mode set correctly for your drive.

Your BIOS might also have something to clear your DMI pool also. If not you will need to trigger a DMI pool update. You can do this many ways but it is just easy to reflash your BIOS firmware to the current version.

You might also just toggle some hardware settings and tell the BIOS to reboot. if the DMI pool is updated the BIOS SHOULD do a hard reboot. if DMI pool is not updated it will do a soft boot.

Main thing: - clear the DMI pool in the BIOS software updates at the OS level will not help you.
- tell the BIOS that the OS will handle the plug and play configuration of hardware.
- make sure you IDE/AHCI mode of your drive did not get changed by mistake.

 

[Otternaut]

Adjusting the BIOS to allow for a PNP OS did have an impact. The boot immediately after worked, windows booted into 640x480 on the new card and allowed me to install the drivers which of course required a reboot.

The boot process is now a touch different, I'd swear the "loading windows" screen persists longer than it did before, although only the text of loading windows and not the colorful sort of blooms that windows would normally display at that point in the process. After a short pause it will bluescreen with the original error.

A check of the BIOS shows the changed setting remains changed. The drives are set to IDE (which is what they should be)

Given the same error, I can only assume that my focus should remain on the BIOS and not the OS but I'm not sure what else can be tried there.

 

[johnbl]

Adjusting the BIOS to allow for a PNP OS did have an impact. The boot immediately after worked, windows booted into 640x480 on the new card and allowed me to install the drivers which of course required a reboot.

The boot process is now a touch different, I'd swear the "loading windows" screen persists longer than it did before, although only the text of loading windows and not the colorful sort of blooms that windows would normally display at that point in the process. After a short pause it will bluescreen with the original error.

A check of the BIOS shows the changed setting remains changed. The drives are set to IDE (which is what they should be)

Given the same error, I can only assume that my focus should remain on the BIOS and not the OS but I'm not sure what else can be tried there.

Your BIOS and the Operating system were fighting for control of the hardware configurations.

If you can get the machine to boot, have it boot in VGA mode (f8 key I think)

There might be some software setting to make a PCI 3.0 card work correctly in a PCI 2.x bus. That would be a video driver setting made during the driver setup. Be sure to get the driver from the OEM not the default one that Microsoft has or the one that came with your new vid board but a current down loaded driver from amd.

- Remove the old video drivers that failed to work
- Turn off the auto install of device drivers in windows for the time being.
- update your motherboard's chipset drivers directly from the intel web site.

- run control panel device manager and check for hardware changes but do not let it install video software. You want to do it yourself after windows boots and runs correctly without the driver.

-after you get a good VGA only boot you can install the video drivers directly from AMD while in windows VGA mode. Shutdown, and power cycle the machine
and see if you can boot correctly with the driver installed.

 

[Otternaut]

Ok. Partial success. Mostly success even!
I have the new card working, with the latest drivers, at proper resolution.

The fail part? I need one of the old video cards in the second slot to boot or else I continue to blue screen. Another card in and everything boots flawlessly, or else the same error repeats itself.

I'm assuming at this point despite best efforts that the wrestling match between the OS and the Bios is still present and the old card, for whatever reason, makes one of them happy to leave it well enough alone. The old card draws a little bit of power even idle, it restricts airflow, it is unideal. Even with all that at this point I'm calling it a win. Thanks so much for all the help.

 

[Otternaut]

Best answer selected by Otternaut.