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Windows will not boot. Suspect gfx card?

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whistl3r - Sep 20, 2010 at 10:04 AM
 TheBank - Jan 3, 2011 at 02:14 PM
Hello,
Yesterday I was happily gaming on my 18 month year old machine on which I've zero problems since I built it.

My game froze and I was forced to hard reset. During windows start up it blue screened but restarted before I could take any notes. The next reboot i went to a screen giving me the option to start normally or enter windows repair I could do nothing with my keyboard so it automatically started the repair sequence which when completed informed me there was nothing it could fix it then gave me the option to try memory checks and restore points neither of which helped. One thing I've noticed is I get pink dots in neat patterns all over my screen ( I believe these are called relics?)

A few restarts and repairs I randomly came to my Windows login screen but with a tiny resolution and very few colours displayed. Everything seemed to be working i could connect to the net and browse files. I checked device manager and my gfx card was the only thing marked with a "!". When selected it suggested a driver was missing so i downloaded and installed the latest Nvida driver and needed to reboot which of course took back to my original problem and since I've been unable to get to my desktop since.



Other things worth mentioning are I've cleared my CMOS (including removing battery) after seeing some strange characters in the post screens and in the BIOS but these remain.



I've given my system a good clean today and even reseated the gfx card in a second PCI-E slot on my mobo.

I've let the system cool down over night with no improvement

I've ordered a new gfx card as I dont have a spare to eliminate that as a problem but i've never known a gfx card to stop windows starting, am i missing the real problem?

Any help gratefully received.



Oh I can't seem to get to the safe mode menu. I've tried tapping f8 from the second i restart but it either goes straight to the windows loading bar and then goes black or goes to the windows repair or normal start option screen.
Related:

2 responses

Answer 1 / 2
whistl3r
Sep 20, 2010 at 12:58 PM
Code:
Problem Signature:
Problem Event Name: StartupRepairOffline
Problem Signature 01: 6.1.7600.16385
Problem Signature 02: 6.1.7600.16385
Problem Signature 03: unkown
Problem Signature 04: 21201077
Problem Signature 05: AutoFailover
Problem Signature 06: 10
Problem Signature 07: BadDriver
OS Version 6.1.7600.2.00.256.1
Locale ID: 1033


cant enter safemode or boot from windows DVD as they keyboard stops responding during this phase of boot. Works for entering bios and again once im in the repair part.

Also tried different ram and thats not the problem.
0
Answer 2 / 2
TheBank
Jan 3, 2011 at 02:14 PM
Sounds like a dead video card, my room-mate is having the same problem you are, the only difference is we were able to write down the bsod which came up saying a nvidia driver was at fault. Check when your computer boots up to see if there is a difference in how it displays the bios splash screen. Some people call it "matrix view" meaning you can still read the splash screen but it looks like characters are displayed over what should be clean rendered pixels. (Like a Q over a blue box that should just be blue). The only way to know for sure is to take out your video card and test installing windows in another machine, or get a new video card in your own. Because of all this I'm going to get a spare video card just in case of failure. A lot of people think "hey I'm seeing something on my screen, the video card must be fine" what they don't realize is that your video card isn't really being utilized when you boot up (in other words it's not trying to render video in open gl or direct x). As soon as you realize that "hey it's just passing on instructions," which it will do until it tries to boost up the resolution or during the second install pass (after everything's been expanded and the machine has rebooted).

Please correct me if I'm wrong here, this is based off personal experience.
I am not sure of what method is used to render video on the card before an operating system loads.

Hope this helps. Also the main culprit in video card failure is not cleaning the dust out of the fans and having the card overheat, keep your next video card clean. I recommend buying a can of air and giving your machine a once over every month. For the sake of the fans be sure to put a finger on the fan before blasting air at it (don't let the fan spin, as fun as it looks they are not supposed to spin at the rate that a compressed air can will make them spin). My roomies computer was filled with dust, and the fan on the video card wasn't working properly. I'm going to try to get a cheap video card to test my theory, and will post back when I do.
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