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NVIDIA graphics driver causing no-boot

2K views 4 replies 2 participants last post by  LoganCale 
#1 ·
I am working on an HP Pavilion (See system details below) that I have been trying to fix for a friend. After a Windows update, the user reported that the system stopped booting into anything other than safe mode. I found some virus infections and decided to re-install the OS from the recovery partition. After doing this, the system still failed to boot anytime the graphics card was initialized. Every time I install any of the NVIDIA graphics drivers (I even tried some of the older ones) the system fails to boot (hangs with black screen right after the loading Windows scroll bar, then goes into repeated re-boot). I have to boot into safe-mode and roll back the driver to the generic VGA driver every time. The generic driver works just fine to boot the machine, but the resolution is low and the graphics are somewhat sluggish. I am assuming that this is a driver problem, since the video card does work when I use the generic VGA Windows driver. Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

PS. I have experienced a BSOD a few times right after installing the drivers. The BSOD referenced “NVLDDMKM.SYS”. I also noticed that a couple of items are added to startup and an NVIDIA service is also started when the driver package is installed.

Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce8400GS
OS Name Microsoft® Windows Vista™ Home Premium
Version 6.0.6001 Service Pack 1 Build 6001
System Model GN553AA-ABA m9040n
System Type X86-based PC
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz, 2394 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)
BIOS Version/Date American Megatrends Inc. 5.10, 9/20/2007
SMBIOS Version 2.5
 
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#3 ·
Yes, the system does have onboard VGA on the motherboard and when I switch to onboard graphics (via BIOS) everything works OK, but the PCI video card supports DVI and several other options. Do you think that the video card could be bad even though it works when in safe mode and when using the Windows graphics drivers? Is there some part of the card (ie cache) this is not tripped unless you use the NVIDIA drivers?
 
#5 ·
I ended up replacing the card with a new ATI PCI-E card and now all is well. I think some of the higher functions of the NVIDIA card must have burned out (even though it was just over 1yr old). Thanks for all your advice. I did appreciate the feedback.
 
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