DesktopPC meltdown

[Fumz]

well heres the problem im having NOW:

i did reformat

when i run a perfectly fresh version of windows, It starts crashing before i even have a chance to download and install sp1.

for some reason my original problem board refuses to boot at all.

the only reason i mention the video card is bc i never had this problem until i switched boards. it may be that windows installed an update in the background and it was just coincidentally the same time i installed the card. in fact thats (probably) what it is. but regardless, the first 3 "paragraphs" i just typed above are what are confounding me the most.

I'm not even going to ask if you installed the chipset drivers or let Vista patch itself before you tried to dl SP1; if I find out you did, I'm going to stab myself in the eye... Also, if you don't think the details of this new board are important, I'm not going to press the issue.

Reboot the machine, go into the bios and load the optimized defaults. Save your changes and reboot.

Get this: http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/ Save it to your desktop then unplug your ethernet. Boot into Safe Mode and run Driver Sweeper. Wipe out all the nvidia drivers. Reboot.

Right click on Computer and select properties. Click 'Advanced System Settings'. Under the 'Startup an Recovery' menu, click settings. Under 'System Failure' uncheck 'Automatically restart'. Exit out. If at any time during these next steps you get a bsod, write down the error.

Next, run a chkdsk for errors; cross your fingers and hope that no hardware has been damaged beyond repair. If chkdsk finds errors, let it fix them. While this is going on, if you have another machine burn SP1 and install it when chkdsk is finished doing its thing. Do not let Windows Update update your machine with 50 patches; patch directly to SP1. Now you can plug back in your ethernet.

Here's the tricky part. Install your chipset drivers. Don't use the one's on the CD; instead, get them from your mobo maker's site. *sigh* Please don't install the nVidia SATA driver.

With any luck, you will survive this without any BSOD's. Go to the Device Manager. Under IDE/ATA ATAPI look for an entry named nVidia nForce Serial ATA Controller. Highlight it and select properties, then select the Driver tab. If the Driver Provider is NVIDIA, uninstall it and reboot the machine. Upon reboot, Windows will load its own driver.

Report back.

This of course all assumes an nvidia chipset. It would be nice to know if we're now dealing with a different chipset, but... I suppose we can't just go spouting State secrets all over teh internets.

 

[Everlong]

Could it not be that he's not loading the SATA drivers for Vista when installing it? I had this problem back with XP and if I didn't install them, it blue screened when loading.

 

[Fumz]

I don't think so. Vista doesn't install like XP. It doesn't ask for SCSI or RAID drivers when installing; it doesn't need them. Besides, way back when this all started, he said he was getting the sata driver error. Some reading around shows that this error can cause all kinds of random havoc.

 

[Everlong]

The option to load the drivers though is still there when you choose the partition to install to.

But was just a thought anyway.

 

[pilaf]

lol ok wow. new problem: windows wouldnt even install. it would give me error codes during installation and stuff. also was getting BSODS with MEMORY_MANAGEMENT. obviously had to be mobo psu or cpu. i got a different version of windows at the store bc i technically was not supposed to be using that CD anyway. -there were still problems installing of course, which i figured there would be, so last resort swapped the psu for my old one. my pc is running so.... wow. i really really didnt want it to be the psu i mean i love corsair everyone said it would work and so did i, and now its running on the rosewill which will not run my gtx 260 which means even if my system is stable, i cant play ****ing crysis.

i said the problem didnt arise until i switched vgas but i also switched psus at the same time and being so stressed out about stuff led me to overlook it or just not want to get a new psu. so now im not crashing by random **** or memory management, so now ill be able to follow the instructions in that last post there about drivers. so now i have to find a damn psu that will run stable on my system AGAIN GAH

first thing i did was choose not to install updates during installation, which turned out to be a good move. i hate auto-update sooooo much, it would always minimize my games and now it caused me the most trouble in the history of this computer. for as long as im running an nvidia board i shall install all my updates MANUALLY

that last long post looks good so im about to follow those steps. and no i didnt install chipset drivers before downloading sp1

 

[johngalt]

Simple - RMA the PSU for another one.

No product is ever 100% perfect OOB (and by that I don't mean each individual item, but I mean in a batch of, say, a couple of hundred of PSUs, there is bound to be a (or even a few) bad ones....