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9800GX2 boot problem

lankymorley

lankymorley

lankymorley

Associate
Joined
4 Jan 2008
Posts
178
I installed my 9800GX2 tonight, installed the latest drivers from Nvidia's site and rebooted. I then ran several stability tests and benchmarks, all of which went well.

I then shut down to neaten up the cabling a little and screw in the PCI bracket. I replaced the side panel and powered up. The computer POSTed fine and the Vista loading bar came up and was followed by the blank screen which preceeds the logon screen. The only difference to a usual boot, though, was that where as this screen usually only lasts 2-3 seconds, this time it remained blank for over 10 minutes. I powered down and started the computer again and was faced with the same blank screen. It has been this way for around half an hour and is still blank as I type this message.

Any ideas what could be causing this problem and what could I try doing to fix it?

My specs are as follows:
Asus P5W DH Deluxe
Q6700 cooled with Arctic Freezer 7
BFG 9800GX2
Creative Soundblaster Audigy
2GB Crucial Ballistix 1066 MHz
1KW Enermax Galaxy PSU
150GB WD Raptor
500GB Some WD HDD
A couple of Lite-On Optical Drives

Also, my PCI-E Freq is at 105, my VDIMM is at 2.1V and the RAM is running around 200MHz below rated, so I dont think this will be a problem.
 
You put on the side panel before re-powering up. It's almost a garunteed self build fail! :D

Realistically, you probabaly just nudged a wire when you were tidying up. A friend of mine actually shorted a fan cable on his case whilst tidying and the PC wouldn't even power up because of it! I'de try de-tidying and replugging everything in from scratch, see if that gets you back to the original state.
 
Ok, I took the side off and made sure everything was connected correctly and all seemed to be in perfect order, but I still could not get to the logon screen. I tried safe mode and got to the logon screen no problem whatsovever. This made me think that it was the driver that is causing this problem, so I uninstalled it and got to the logon screen after starting windows normally (no safe mode.)

So I can be fairly certain that this is a driver issue, but I dont know where to go from here. Try loads of past drivers and see if they fix the problem?
 
Download something called Driver Cleaner, boot into safe mode and clean all Nvidia display drivers.. Reinstall newest WHQLs (Or another set if they're the ones you're trying, maybe an older late 17x set?) and reboot as normal into windows.
 
PCI-E freq. 105? Didn't think it was advisable to go over 101 and even that's only needed to alleviate certain issues some people have.
 
Sorry to dig this up, I just wanted to make sure nobody runs into the same probelm that I did here.

I ended up using a driver cleaner and could successfully boot and install new drivers which worked fine with the GX2 going into a normal windows boot.

I then went onto attempting to overclock the card and installed coolbits. As soon as I did this I rebooted and was faced with the same problem as before. So I've concluded that it was the coolbits registry entry which was stopping windows from loading. I cleaned the drivers and reinstalled them which got rid of the entry and now I'm folding on the card with overclocked shaders which I have done with RivaTuner. Thanks for the help!

@jambus: I was only setting my PCI-E freq to 105 to make sure it wasn't a low PCI-E freq that was stopping me from booting, it's back at 101 now. ;)
 
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