Win 7 Crash

[MarkTV88]

Hi guys + gals,

Win 7 crashed on me last night and I haven't been able to get it going again. I installed a new graphics card about two months ago, other than that I've only installed a couple of bits of software (portal 2 and firefox 4 to be specific).

I've attached a picture showing the exact error message but I have no idea what's going on. I get the message (and crash) as the windows logo shows (you know where the colours swirl around and join the logo before the login screen).

What I've done so far - I've tried rebooting using the win install disc, no love. I've run diagnostics (using sea tool or whatever its called) on the boot drive, apparently its clean. It also opens perfectly ok when I put it into my external hard drive enclosure and open it using my laptop. The computer actually asks me if I want to run startup repair or run windows normally. Neither work. Although, curiously, if I run the computer from the boot disc then it takes it longer to crash when going down the startup repair path.

Any clues? I have all of my really critical, irreplaceable data (photos etc) on an external hard drive so I'm not worried about wiping it if I have to and starting again, but I'd obviously like to avoid the hassle if I can.

[MarkTV88]

hmm, the image won't attach but its here:

http://img197.imageshack.us/i/imag0099n.jpg/

[danroyle]

have you tried going into the computer in safe mode first off. Thats always a good place to start. tap F8 after post screen has gone and go from there see if you can get in to that and then maybe try restoring the pc to a day before the problem or uninstall portal 2 and firefox and go from there,

[hotel2tango]

Got the latest driver for your GPU?

[MarkTV88]

I would've have tried that first fix, but unfortunately when I hit f8 at startup all I get is the Startup Repair/Start Normally prompt. Either one of which causes it to BSOD.

As for the drivers, I thought so. They were only updated within the last few weeks but as I can't start the computer up, I don't know how to go about removing them from the HDD manually in order to try a reinstall. If someone can show me how to do this I'll give it a shot.

[MarkTV88]

It looks like it was the video drivers after all, just not the ones I thought. It turns out that my old nVidia card did not fully uninstall the drivers, thus leaving them sitting on the drive alongside the ATI ones from my new card. Once removed, the BSOD behaviour ended and I was able to run startup repair. So far it looks all good.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. :-)

[vinnyT]

Hi, realise you have solved this, but for future reference, after you remove a video driver it is a good idea to run Guru3D - Driver Sweeper (http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/) to clean up any remnants left behind.

edit: Sorry, ignore this, they have discontinued driver sweeper.

[Ferral]

Driver Sweeper is still going, just grab the last build revision number from Guru3D and when you install it there is a link to update at the top. Takes you to the Phyxion homepage to update.

http://www.phyxion.net/item/driver-sweeper.html