Cleared Video Drivers, now WIN7 broke

[JPicasso]

I was getting BSOD errors with my Radeon 6950 graphics card, after the 13.1 driver update.
So I decided to replace them with the last version, 12.11 12.10?

Uninstalled, ran DriverCleanerPro, then installed the older drivers.

Now, my machine won't boot to windows. I get as far as it requesting Safe mode, and it loads some drivers, and I get the generic windows logo on a black screen for 1/2 second, then get a quick flash of an abbreviated blue screen, and back to rebooting.

I'm getting nervous at this point. Any suggestions?

-JP

 

[I.M.O.G.]

If you press f8 after POST, you should get some options, one of which I believe is an option to disable automatic restarts when there are errors. This should let you read the blue screen to see what it says.

Are you getting this bsod after you select safe mode, or when you try to boot normally?

Worst case, you can do a repair install to fix it. I would try to fix it in safe mode first.

 

[JPicasso]

Well, that was interesting.

I forgot I had the harddrive of a laptop who's MB had failed connected to USB. Apparently, as I removed video drivers and restarted things, it got on the list of boot drives.

Unplugged, and windows has loaded fine.
Still not sure I"ve solved my BSOD troubles, but time will tell.

Thanks

 

[I.M.O.G.]

Oops, that would be a problem!

Often times the BIOS is configured to try to boot first from external media - so if you connect something, it will try to boot from it. That's how that happened.

 

[JPicasso]

So It got stranger, but not really.

Turns out my failures were not due to the Catalyst update, which happend to coincide with my Crucial M4 SSD hitting around 5000 hours of operation. Apparently, at that time, The M4's lose their minds and fail after an hour of operation. Weirdness! All the BSODs seemed to be related to display issues, but obviously were not. Anyways, maybe this thread can help someone with a similar problem.

Update your Crucial SSD's firmware if your machine is experiencing hourly failures.