Vista - DesktopPC meltdown

Just within the past week I put in a new psu and replaced my old graphics card with a gtx 260.

I played assassins creed which came with the card, and i cant remember having any problems with it and it may have crashed once but i cant entirely remember.

I decided this game is awesome until i got to the cave area i encountered these odd black bars covering large portions of my screen, I guess it had to do with lighting filters or something but when i looked at a certain area it just lost picture in some areas.

I think that is unrelated to my actual problem though, i got over it and it wasnt a huge deal I could just turn around and back around and they were gone.

BAM

crashed. blue screen, ok so I restart my comp, try to play again. game crashes. somethings wrong with my HD, the system says NTFS.

I have not had any problems like this whatsoever but now various problems occur such as the game crashing when im trying to load a saved game.

tried tons of stuff but got that blue screen like 10 times before so I decided to run in safe mode, xferred some important files over to my backup drive

time to resort to drastic measures.

reformatted and said goodbye to my precious 250 gigabytes of data and let windows install then fell asleep when it was going...

next morning windows loads everythings cool so I reinstall aim msn firefox all that good stuff and reinstall crysis.

i didnt mind replaying thru the game to get where i was, it was pretty fun and im better at it now so i can try different approaches and whatnot anyway i get to the part where you have to rescue the girl in the village before teh tanks come.

well first off, it crashed once or twice while i was in that village, then when i got the girl i went on the roof to shoot the tanks -but the trees... have rainbow colored leaves.. awesome.

anyway i alt f4'd out and uh oh BLUE SCREEN. reboot again, BLUE SCREEN AGAIN.reboot again and this time i get a black screen saying windows file system is NTFS AGAIN!!! AGAIN!.

I reboot and get a blue screen again, reboot again...windows loads fine but random programs are crashing.

I have to actually type this in notepad and copy paste it before firefox crashed again...now 30 minutes after the last crash i get a message (just now) saying this:

A problem with a NVIDIA nForce(TM) SATA Driver driver has caused your computer to shut down and restart unexpectedly. This type of problem is commonly referred to as a "stop error" or "blue screen."

This problem has been fixed in Windows Vista Service Pack 1. first of all im not even USING the SATA chip so that shouldnt even be a problem. I havent installed SP1 yet obviously but this msg doesnt change anything.

Im still posting this and if i can get it to stop crashing ill let you know.. I would post system specs but i truly honestly dont think it makes an iota of difference.

I used the driver that came with the card.

psu: corsair tx650

ive managed to keep the pc running long enough to almost finish downloading SP1 since the stop error said this:

A problem with a NVIDIA nForce(TM) SATA Driver driver has caused your computer to shut down and restart unexpectedly.

thats the chip on my mobo that im obviously not using. im wondering about installing the driver for that and then installing the gtx over it but I dont know if it would have any effect but i cant even deduce a problem without first checking performance after the service pack.

also getting numerous windows error popups saying something like "X program has stopped working due to a problem in the run32.dll" or some random **** like that. ive never seen anything like this on such scale im thinking its pretty deep bc ive gotten that message for at least 10 different processes

You're not alone with nVidia SATA driver problems:
NVIDIA Forums > Blue screen in vista, nForce(TM) SATA Driver

Problem caused by NVIDIA nForce(TM) SATA Driver - Tech Support Guy Forums

Problem caused by NVIDIA nForce(TM) SATA Driver - SLI Zone Forums

I would uninstall it and just use the default Windows driver. See what that does?

drivers are my weakspot. uninstall the gtx driver and use the windows default? whats the windows default?

Not sure what the problem is, but nVidia has for a long time had problems with their hard drive drivers; before this SATA driver problem they had the notorious SW_IDE driver problem.

What I mean by default drivers is to use the SATA drivers that Windows provides. In short, you don't have to do anything but let Windows handle it. The only thing you have to do is uninstall the nVidia SATA drivers; leave the graphics drivers as they are.

You can do that through Add/Remove Programs. Select the nVidia drivers, then select to uninstall a specific driver and choose the SATA driver. Uninstall it, then reboot. With any luck, you'll be back gaming in about 2 minutes.

FYI, there is no fix from nVidia yet, or at least that's what I gather from what little I've read, so if at some point you find yourself re-installing Windows, remember to NOT install the nVidia SATA driver. I'm not familiar with their new chipset driver package, but if it's anything like it was on the nForce 3 or nForce 4, they'll ask you if you want to install this driver separate from the other chipset drivers.

tried the add/remove thing but had 5 successive BSODs, now in safe mode. cant seem to find the add/remove menu here but im trying this:



idk if this will work

perhaps this would also do something

No. What you're doing is messing with the display drivers... stop. Display drivers are not your problem. Your problem is with the nVidia SATA driver.

Boot into Safe Mode, then go to the Control Panel, then go to Add/Remove Programs and remove the SATA driver only according to the instructions above. Again, you do not need to remove the display drivers, only the SATA driver.

Btw, you'll want to place a checkmark back in the nVidia display driver box in MSCONFIG and you'll also want to re-enable the drivers in the services menu... if you've disabled it.

well, didnt work, crysis crashed again. then i got 2 BSODs

my other card xfx 8600gt xxx didnt have any problems like this im pretty sure. i did have a few BSODs over the course of like... 6 months but i dont remember what caused them. not nearly as bad as this though. the problem must have arisen upon introduction of the gtx 260's driver. when i go to remove the sata display driver its not there all it has is "nvidia display driver" type stuff. im assuming it contains the collective of display drivers on my system and i cant select a specific one to disable. according to one BSOD it says the sata driver problem is fixed in SP1 but attempts at DLing failed due to random crashes. im gonna try DLing in safe mode since it seems to not crash here. i was going to uninstall the gtx driver to see if it was causing the driver errors but now im saying **** it. i hope sp1 will DL and install in safe mode and then i can boot with no problem, but if it doesnt work im nuking windows and reformatting again, THEN hopefully itll be stable and wont crash and i can DL SP1 then install the gtx and if what the stop error said was correct and the sata driver erros was indeed fixed in sp1 i wont have any problems