FIX: nvlddmkm.sys has stopped responding and has recovered [VISTA ERROR]

[CarRamrod234]

Well I was going to dual boot Vista and XP and just use XP until SP1 comes out for Vista but I was having trouble repartitioning my HDD. I then thought about just formatting Vista and putting XP on my rig but I don't feel like losing all my stuff and having to reinstall all of it. I was actually going to try to dual boot again but I was reading around online yesterday and saw that Vista's SP1 is supposed to come out soon, Intel's CEO accidentally leaked it and said that it was supposed to come in October or by the end of 2007. I saw stuff saying that it's supposed to be in Quarter 4 of 2007 which is now so I think I'll just suck it up and wait for it. If it comes and doesn't address this problem I will be royally ****ed and will definitely put XP on my PC.

 

[paulrozza]

Alrighty then...

Only 1.30AM this morning, wife starting to get s$#ted of with me, but hey, that's married life.

I 'borrowed' a floppy drive out of one of the HP desktops at work and managed to get the wife to find an elderly gentleman with a floppy disk at her work (no lie man, does anyone actually use these things anymore?) and got the RAID drivers to load in XP.

I went through the suggested task of shrinking the RAID 0 stripe, formating the new partition but I had actually scavenged the 200GB SATA II drive out of my old PC in an effort to get XP on that as well. Low and behold, XP saw the RAID 0 partition as well as the additional HDD, so I installed to the HDD and will grow the Vista stripe to account for the entire RAID set.

XP installs fine, and with the Asus Striker Mobo I can press F8 at boot and select either the RAID Stripe for Vista, or the other HDD for XP. Totally cool as the Vista MBR is not corrupted and I have no need to muck about with Easy BCD.

I've also gone through the process of uninstalling the nVidia driver (as mentioned in a previous post-worked in 3DMark but failed miserably in anything newish - i.e World In Conflict, The Witcher, SupCom etc. After doing this and rebooting, I tried to install the latest 169.12 driver. The install ran way too fast and even though confirmed didn't actually install. I tried to reinstall several times to no avail.

Interestingly, letting Vista search for the driver on the net resulted in another reboot but this time the card was identified as a 'Display Driver' in Device Manager and the driver stuck.

I then tried 3DMark06 again, and got a result in the low 12,000's.

Job for the weekend: get the Wireless Adapter working in XP Pro to update, install drivers in XP Pro, update the driver to 169.12 in Vista and (hopefully) do some testing.

 

[Treytor]

Now I have a bluetooth HID Device: Access is Denied. Which I also had for the graphics card until I manually installed the drivers. Now I can't use my keyboard and no solutions to fix it have helped.

I am having this exact same problem after trying this fix. What did those command line commands do, exactly? I'm getting this error with my bluetooth, and also when trying to plug in a standard corded USB mouse just so I can at least click around.

What's going on?

Edit: I think I ran the commands in safe mode instead of booting into Vista normal. Does this make a difference? Is there any way I can undo the effects of this?

 

[paulrozza]

I've spent way too many man hours on this, but luckily one of my friends offered my an 8600GT card to do a test with, with very interesting results.

Firstly, after mucking about with all my components, trying the fix listed at the start of this column, installing patch updates on all my games, I decided to run a couple of tools to see if I could get some idea if anything was failing without repeatedly pulling/plugging components. After all, this machine is a new build using brand new high end components with additional cooling (even though I am not attempting to overclock!).

I installed two tools - Burn In Test and the latest version of SiSoft's Sandra. Both trials, as I don't need these once my machine has been verified as passing the rigorous tests that these applications put the machine through.

Well, what do you know, I could not get more than about 90 seconds into either of the applications burn in tests without failing one or more sections.

It was at this point I decided that I was going to pull my $1000 EVGA 8800 Ultra Superclocked card, and install my friends stock 8600GT...with surprising results.

Everything runs well. Crysis (whilst running at an extremely low frame rate) was, for the first time...playable. Could this be a fluke? I then tried a benchmark of World In Conflict (this has always crashed), and again...passed with flying colours. I then tried a multitude of other titles...Supreme Commander, C&C 3, The Witcher, S.T.A.L.K.E.R and others...all worked flawlessly.

I can only come to one conclusion...it was the EVGA board all along. I have read a heck of a lot on this issue, and have received an education 'under fire' on this topic. One thing I have seen time and time again is that some of the 'factory overclocked' cards have massive trouble with the NVLDDMKM issue.

I can testify to the fact that my board would not run anything comfortably, and when it did run it only ran for a matter of minutes at the most before a BSOD or CTD.

My final advice, try Memtest to make sure your memory is properly configured and not issuing errors. After this, try Sandra and Burn In Test to make sure the rest of your components are sound. And if all else fails, beg, borrow or acquire another card to test your machine...you might find that the card you are using is a dud...good luck!

I am now RMA'ing the Ultra, and installing 2xXFX 8800GT Alpha Dog's in SLI. Finally, gaming heaven is within reach...I know, I can smell it!

 

[Treytor]

After many hours of messing with this, I can say that doing the procedure really screws up the drivers in Vista. Not just display, but it has repercussions all around. Thank God for system restore, as I've used it about 10 times trying to figure out what's going on.

Every time I messed with permissions in that directory, my display driver, bluetooth drivers, hell even a simple USB mouse wouldn't install correctly because of reported "Access is denied" errors, "file not found errors", along with other problems.

I appreciate the effort in trying to resolve this problem, but I think I can safely say do NOT do this.

 

[bbrass10]

A Brief Suggestion and a Request

I get this problem all the time too, now. It didn't happen when I first installed Vista. It started happening when my Asus A8N-SLI mobo's chipset fan stopped working -- a problem which that mobo is somewhat infamous for. This seems to have something very closely in common with the many reports that underclocking the Northbridge (various memory options, etc) and removing a memory stick have solved the problem for some people. I suppose that a Northbridge which is not cooled well enough could exhibit timing problems that would be difficult for either Vista or video drivers to handle.

By reading the various posts on this forum, I can only assume that some of you have some seriously high-powered third-party chipset fans on your systems. Please confirm if this is true, or if there is any known correlation between this hardware configuration and the error message.

Thanks for your time.

 

[JenBell]

Welcome Brass10...is there a correlation between hardware and error messages...to a certain...yep.

I am running the beta's released on the 12thDec'07 with 2x2GB dimm sticks (Corsair PC6400) with my CPU OCed from its default 2.93Ghz to 4.4Ghz on custom-phase, eVGA 680i mobo P30 bios with a lot of devices connected to hit (NAS array, 5 internal HDDs, 4 external USB HDDs, etc) and right now my PC is rock stable. This install is now around 4 months old and has around 40 apps installed on 24/7.

I keep repeating the same line but for all the people that swear my method does not work...everytime I have gone around to have a look I find that they are not copying the expanded NVL file to all the locations they need to. I am not even using drivercleaner anymore to remove the drivers as I think its no longer needed.

I am personally killing off the whole single-dimm myth I was swearing by. Three different sets of dimms tells me that the OS is fine. I have not installed SP1 RC either. There is only one thing that really bugs me though...how crap the 8800ultra plays crysis-_-

 

[bbrass10]

A Small Clarification

I guess I was suggesting that one of the possible reasons that many people may be experiencing this problem is because of the fact that their Northbridges are being impaired by inferior cooling, due to the fact that many mobos use barely acceptable chipset fans, many of which tend to deteriorate over time due to dust and other factors. This might cause timing issues that create software problems for the OS and/or video drivers. (A firmware problem with the Northbridge would cause similar results.) That would be one explanation why underclocking the Northbridge or using a single DIMM would solve the problem for a lot of people.

This doesn't really mean that the OS or the drivers are not responsible for the problem; simply that the developers have not considered all of the possible timing issues. It would also mean that, until the software can deal with as-yet unpredicted timing issues, a quality high-end, third-party chipset cooler might solve the problem for some people. I have not yet tried this with my system, but I plan on giving it a whirl. I'd be curious if the problem is dominated by persons with poor quality, stock chipset fans, and how many people experience the problem with high-quality chipset fans but are not doing any serious overclocking...

I mean, if it actually works as a temporary solution, it's a lot better than temporarily crippling your system until the developers arrive at a more permanent solution...especially with a $20 or $30 price tag. Right?

Edit: Please note that I am not referring to the CPU cooler, which many people have posted in this forum as part of their system specs, but to the chipset cooler on the mobo...

 

[bbrass10]

Some Additional Support

As some additional support of this theory I'd like to quote an earlier post from torin3:

I feel like an idiot, but I finally figured out why, in my particular case, I was getting this error. My northbridge and southbridge voltages were increased when I was going for my maximum overclock, but never reduced back to the lowest stable voltage. Whenever the airflow was getting bad, this would develop. When it would suddenly fix itself, it could be traced back to having shut off the computer for a while. It would take a while after shut-down to build the heat back up, which usually translated out to a day or two. I opened up the case and turned down the voltaged to just slightly over the automatic settings, and I haven't had it show up since.

 

[torin3]

As some additional support of this theory I'd like to quote an earlier post from torin3:

Actually, I've been meaning to post more about it. On further study, it doesn't appear to actually be heat related.... Whether the airflow is good or not, and with no relation to air temperature, it needs to be shut down every 3 days to avoid this problem.

It only needs to be off for about 10 minutes for the fix to work, and then it can go for another 3 days or so. I'm starting to think it is only voltage related and some type charge is building up in my hardware and it takes about 3 days to get to a critical level, but turning it off for 10 minutes will drain it back to zero again.

Weirdest thing, but it seems to be consistant. I was trying to give it plenty of time to throw another curve at me, (as I've been wrong several times before in this thread) but this seemed a good of time as any.

 

[bbrass10]

Giving Up

Well, OK, I was able to run the nTune stability test for hours and hours, and I thought I had the situation licked. But just about every one of my more demanding games choked on this nvlddmkm.sys error anyway. I installed Vista SP1 RC, and got the same results. Does anyone know exactly WHY Microsoft and the various graphics card manufacturers have not resolved this issue for so long?

Edit:

It's a couple of hours later, and I am a little more optimistic. After underclocking my DIMMs, almost all of my games are running pretty consistently, even with high-speed downloads running in the background, despite the fact that the chipset fan is still kaput (I'm using a jury-rigged chassis fan in its place, but the chipset is still running a little hot at 35 degrees Celsius.) So there's a good chance that a quality third-party chipset fan might resolve the issue. In the GeForce4, the Northbridge and Southbridge are combined on a single chip, and it looks like they're a little overstressed, and that underclocking relieves enough stess to resolve the problem. Only one game is crashing, the somewhat less demanding "Call of Cthulhu", which does not allow you to select any video options other than "brightness". I'm just about finished downloading the demo for Crysis, and I'm curious to see how that one turns out.

Still, I'm a software developer, and I'm wondering if anyone knows why the people with the source code (Microsoft and the driver developers) have been ignoring such a key issue. Microsoft bragged about how much better Vista is for games, yet everyone with high-end gaming software has been unable to make it work with the more demanding games for almost a year. I understand that there is some sort of lawsuit evolving around the unified drivers. Does that have anything to do with it?

 

[bbrass10]

Crysis Demo Worked Fine Too

Except for a few graphical artifacts, Crysis worked fine too, as long as I kept my memory a little underclocked. I'm still waiting for feedback from you guys...

 

[sackmeister]

Hi JenBel, I tried your solution on my PC and it did not work. I followed the instructions to the letter including expanding the nvlddmkm.sys file from the Nvidia source and using it to replace the other instances. You clearly put a lot of time and effort into your solution, but it simply did not work for me. If you want, I can post details of my system and we can look to see if I missed something. I greatly appreciate any assistance you could offer.

 

[bornslippy5]

adding my twopennith

hi have been reading this long succession of posts...phewwy glad i'm not only one commiting so much time/patience and annoyance (from wife) on this problem.
1st off i like vista have ultimate 64bit and looks incredible, and for normal tasks..ie. anything except games it is the bee's knees.
specs as follows
striker extreme 1305bios
qx6850 oc'd 3500 x10 multy
2 x 2gb ocz pc8000 reaper x
1kw pc power & cooling psu
2 x 150gb raptors not in raid
2 x evga 8800ultra superclocked silent...modified with waterblocks
vista ultimate 64bit
256mb ageia physx tight fit but possible.

ok may i first mention i was running a dual boot with xp mce2005/vista ultimate64bit

had probs when i went from a x1950 crossfire settup(which was great, no probs appart from slow downs) to my 1st ultra in my old a8r 32mvp deluxe running xp.
got strange lock ups in d&d online and graw was a nightmare.
thought it was a faulty card so sent it to overclockers uk for testing, said it was fine...
so now am running the above settup, have also tried evga 680i a1 revision a couple of times and gave up with them as had so many c1 memory errors.

so now on striker...
a bit off topic but has anyone managed to get their pc to wake up from sleep? mine starts up but just have a black screen have to hard boot....

anyway back to topic.
nvllddmkm the bain of my life,
have tried all of the above with varying success.
strangly with my system overclocked 3500 cpu linked 3:2 with memory 933 i think at 433 15 2.2v it seems better.

always though it maybe something to do with the sys32 nv entries, managed to delete them after taking the walkround to give permissions. always clean install, driver cleaner/ccleaner and remove nvidia drivers from c:

have also tried the vista sp1 rc with high hopes....doh..no go.

did muck about in registry other day and went to look at a graphics sub heading which had 3 sets of controls (don't know much about them)but noticed that in control 2 the numbers at end didn't match the ones in control 1 and current control.

changed them to 7 and 0 to match the other controls and haven't had a nvldd error for a bit.
got these idea's right or wrong from an evga support rep told me to look at this link
www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/wddm_timeout.mspx
got high hopes as am running crysis at 1900x1200 all at very high appart from 2 settings down to high. and haven't locked up, even when i looked around quick and saw the graphics slow (baited breath and phew).
installed new drivers released yesterday 20/12/2007 and will test em today and keep you posted.

i aint gonna throw blame about btw, just wish good people will help us all enjoy our expensive machinery...

 

[JenBell]

Hello Born...welcome to the forums...Striker mobo's...I talked to a few people that use that mobo and they all told me the same thing, the cooling for the mobo is simply not good enough, most people are sticking a fan to blow over heatsinks...some of them had the fan holder thing from Zalman for there flower coolers and used that. I am also using that as well...u can also use some cable ties to get the job done

As for the NVL...I have had the error appear on me using the latest beta's but that only happens when I am resizing MPclassic and ONLY when playing an MKV file...nothing else can trigger it off. I even followed the advice of one of my PM-only friends and he mentioned that turning off the preview info stuff that appears at the bottom of the explorer window might help...it didn't for me. I turned off all the advanced indexing stuff which has made vista soooo much faster (10Tb's of used storage).

Also something worth pointing out...a lot of people have PMed / emailed me about this so I might as well state it here for the record. If you manage to replace all ur NVL files without having to take ownership of any of them then u are 100% missing one.

When you uninstall the old drivers, restart, install new drivers and start manually copying over the NVL file in the required places, the OS give the user 'system' exclusive ownership to the NVL file it will expect to use initially / after reboot. You cannot simply copy over this instance of the NVL. Use the GUI method to take over the correct permissions. I will be posting up an updated PDF soon enough to show exactly how this should be done.

Once I get the time I will be consolidating all the thread so far and editing the 1st post to make things easier for everyone.

 

[bornslippy5]

hi jb
think my coolings ok with striker... cards are at 50-60 but are watercooled with rad blowin outta front, cpu's watercooled rad blowing out from top of case, got a monster rear fan and a fan attatched to the case door blowing in straight over heatsinks. temps are normally 35degs in case cpu is oc'd and hitting 55.

ok my last install with the new nvidia whql certified driver....whata bummer.
got a wrong one with this driver. must say i didn't totally follow your instructions, this is what i did.
uninstal nvidia drivers from control panel, ran driver cleaner in both normal and safe mode. deleted from the sys32 any nvlddmkm files, have ownership of them now with a past command prompt malarky. installed new drivers, have tried with a diagnostic boot (only basic services running, no av etc) also normal boot. i have 2 nvlddmkm in sys32 both from this new driver.is this right? read through your 1st post but i couldn't see where you're supposed to copy the nvlddmkm files to... think they were on your pdf but got a bit lost trying to open em..
anyway either this driver is pants, or my pc's fed up with all the mucking around.
will play around again but think i'll try old beta as it was a bit better than this new driver..

i admire your tenacity and your courage against this horrible nvlddmkm monster by the way.
hats off to ya.

off on tangent here...the 780i is out very soon...whats chances of this curing the prob do you think?
i'm nearly to the point of selling whole system. so possible choises

a) getting 780i and working with the bits i have, (must say though have been through an a8r32 mvp deluxe with graphic lock ups(was fine b4 changing from crossfire to my 1st evga superclocked 8800ultra) and that was in xp... 3 evga 680i's 1 was doa, and now on striker and had graphics probs all the way xp and vista)
does sound like a naff card situation..?? card/drivers card/drivers ahhhhh
worst is i've put watercooling blocks on cards now too so rma'ing is a nono...

option b) is extreme..
change the whole settup to a
intel x48
2 x hd2900 1gb crossfired
and selling the ultra's and striker...
still not sure if it'd solve anythuing though cos ati are having probs as well i've heard.
boo hoo.

just a note
been using call of juarez dx10 benchmark as a problem status finder. running all settings maxxed. and its rare to get through it without the nvdd monster. managed a few passes of it today and noticed in the scores i was getting minimum of 8fps average of 35.
but the one odd thing when i displayed video memory it only showed 732mb???
got 2 ultra's..???
768 + 768 = 1536
odd...

 

[JenBell]

Hello slippy [sic:-],

If you download the PDF file I created u will the suggested locations for the NVL file.
Simply put u want to replace EVERY SINGLE instance of the NVL file in ur entire system. I have stopped using drivercleaner as well, I think for myself, replacing the all the NVL files is the main issue. We need to make sure that all the copies are the same ones. If u get desperate, u can try the RC version of SP1 and see if that makes a difference…u never know. I am holding off SP1 until its official.

Changing ur mobo is a bit drastic but seriously look into upgrading the cooling on it, I personally think that the stock cooling for ALL the mobo’s on the is simply not good enough (managed to not swear:-|…er…).
All the striker-owning people I know have never used the stock cooling and all upgraded/modded the mobo cooling via air/water.

Here is something people might find interesting…the file repo folder in system32…few people have deleted it entirely. Only thing is that any new hardware u want to install, u will need to have the drivers for it as ur deleting the drivers archive, so when u stick a usb key in, this is where it gets the drivers from…no file repo…no install.

As for the 780i…it might fix it but personally I don’t see myself upgrading to the 780i anytime soon as it simply does not offer what I want. I don’t want a slight performance boost, I want more than that for £150+. Why would I want three GPUs? Why cant they just give me a single physical gpu card with multiple cores? Imagine a 9850X2 or something which 2x 9800 GTX cores with 512MB RAM each all on a single pcb.

I am sure people will post up the problems they come across with the 7xx series as more people buy into it.

As for benching...never used / played that game so cannot comment on it.

 

[CarRamrod234]

JenBell, how do you disable the advanced indexing stuff in Vista? I really want to make it faster. Also, do you know how to upgrade from Vista Home Premium 32-bit to Vista Home Premium 64-bit? I got the upgrade disc from Micro*****'s website but whenever I boot from it I get a BSOD that talks about my drivers...? My specs are:
C2D E6600 (2.4GHZ), 8800GTX, 4GB RAM(DDR2 800, PC2 6400), Vista Home Premium 32-bit
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929777/en-us
That's the problem I'm getting so I'll try the workaround and take out 2GB of RAM and see if it works.

 

[JenBell]

I would stick in 2GB RAM install, apply patch and then stick in the other 2GB stick(s). I was thinking of slipstreaming the update into the ISO itself but it will never get far enough for the patch to come into effect.

What mobo are u using by the way?

I've seen this problem before but that was on the DFI 680i and we somehow managed to fluke it but we were installing ulti with 2GB ram...think the 4x512MB might have had something to do with it.

Sometime u just have use the longwinded method of gettings ticking over

Personally I NEVER upgrade the OS. Always a fresh install. Upgrades always leave remnants that are impossible to remove and eventually cause u problems u would not normally see. This whole upgrade thing is also an issue for mac users upgrading to leo (MB/MBP/iMAC owner so dont even start mac-natics...spent more money on apple gear in the last 2 months than u ever have and use them everyday...sry people...macnuts are just plain lost...tiger is awesome and leo is great...just not as stable as tiger).

Anyways, PM to let me know how things go. If I can help, just PM me...keeps the thread that little bit cleaner.

 

[bornslippy5]

hi all, gone and done a fresh install...too much whisky and deleted too many nv files in a frenzy.. oops must of been that nv4... no boot. so fresh new install vista ultimate 64, internet off, installed all drivers, mobo, new nvidia display driver 20/12/2007, left out soundmax for now to see if it helps,just using windows driver. installed all updates, defragged. installed crysis...seemed ok, installed call of juarez ok for a while...better than b4, then....bang ..upit popped yellow triangle of death ytod.... nvldd monster.
so now have your pdf jenbell, fine bit of work...
followed as close as possible, noted down nvlddmkm entries... had 3 from windows install 14th of something and 2 from new drivers 20/12/07.
so after a lot of permissions gathering, managed to finally get nvlddmkm.sys in place of all other entries, had to take control of whole sys32 to do it....
and game on for a bit...then bang... ytod....
now realised i hadn't put system back in control of the sys32 folder so am really hoping its ok now.
btw the prob is not so frequent as it was... but i think i brought my old vista install to irts knees with driver cleaners, reg cleaners etc.
so fingers crossed..
also added another fan to blow into case from the door so should be nice and chilly in there now....untill the dust bungs it up that is...


strange how i've never hada ytod with 3d mark 06... has anyone?
had best vista score of 17955 with new drivers... should play games real nice...ummmm...we'll see.
fingers x'd