4870 + Windows 7 + Catalyst 9.6 = BSOD on boot

[G33K]

As per the title, I just bought a Radeon 4870 and am having some issues getting it working under Windows 7 (RC1).

When I first plugged it in, it seemed to detect everything fine, installed some drivers and said all was good (for the record I think it might have said something about WDM v1.0 drivers). I went to play Left 4 Dead and Steam told me the drivers were out of date. I stupidly then went to the ATI site and got the latest (v9.6) full catalyst driver install. The installation seemed to go smoothly enough, but when I rebooted as requested, Windows got half way to booting and the BSOD'd saying there was a problem with ATIKMDAG.sys

After a lot of faffing around going in and out of safe mode and using DriverCleaner.net I'm back to software mode. I've tried re-installing but I get the same thing again.

One thing I've noticed which makes me slightly suspicious is that when the driver's installed it list my card as a X2 variant. I've definitely just got a single GPU on this card so maybe it's being detected wrongly?

Has anyone else had problems like this? Is there some other versions of the drivers I can try? I'd like to try the WDM v1.0 drivers if anyone knows where they are?

 

[Tute]

I have the same card (Sapphire branded) and the 9.6 drivers installed fine for me (W7 RC 7100 x64).

I tend to do this when updating drivers.

1. Go to Control Panel... Programs and Features... and run the ATI Catalyst Installer, and tell it to remove all.

2. I then decline the restart, boot up Driver Sweeper, and have it clean the ATI Display drivers.

3. I then reboot.

4. I install the new drivers.

So far, no problems at all. But I know the ATI drivers are quite fussy with uninstalling the old ones. I've watched friends who install over, and they often have issues.

If that doesn't work, then it might be worth giving the 9.5s a try.

 

[G33K]

I'm using the 32 bit version of Windows 7 after reading about all the problems other people had with the 64 bit equivalent.

I think part of the problem here is that there's no way for me to run the uninstaller because once the drivers are installed, windows won't boot. So the only way I can get my machine back is to go into safe mode... and there's no way to run the uninstaller from there - bit of a vicious cycle really

It's a real shame ATI don't have a little utility program to clean up after their drivers... I mean you'd think that having written the software they'd know what gets installed where

I'll give driver sweeper a go tonight. If it gets desperate I might try installing a fresh copy of windows on a spare disk, making a backup and then trying the 9.6's and failing that, the 9.5's just to make sure that there's a chance of getting this working.

Where do you find the old versions of the drivers? I was hunting around for some time last night trying to find them