Win 7 Bluescreens when login screen appears, but can boot safe mode ok - what to do?

steinooo · 24 Jan 2011 at 20:06

hi all,

I have a laptop whereby when I boot it it bluescreens with something like IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL driver, then reboots. However I can get into safe mode fine.

I'm not really sure where to start, doing an offline antivirus scan with an AVG recovery CD at the moment, but it sounds more like a bad driver thing to me? Any ideas gratefully received

IAmATeaf · 24 Jan 2011 at 20:14

I had something similar when my vid card was on its way out. Would work OK in safe mode but would either crash or the PC would have screen corruptions and then freeze. Not the same as you but the PC did have random freezes and blue screen in the months before the card started artifacting.

steinooo · 24 Jan 2011 at 20:24

this is my neighbours, she said it had a virus then reverted it back to a previous state, by which i think she meant system restore. Don't know if that helps? I'm almost certain it's not a hardware thing. AVG has just this second picked up a virus file on it's offline scan thing hmm.

bledd · 25 Jan 2011 at 09:50

in safemode, uninstall any security software and the video drivers, see if that works -take a note of what gfx card it has for when you put them back on

Pestilence · 25 Jan 2011 at 14:40

bledd. said:
in safemode, uninstall any security software and the video drivers, see if that works -take a note of what gfx card it has for when you put them back on

Might not be able to in Safe Mode, as the Windows Installer service will not run in most cases.

Run msconfig and strip out all of the startup items, and all non-MS services. Apply that, and reboot. See how it goes.

If it loads successfully, then you can start uninstalling stuff.

bledd · 25 Jan 2011 at 15:00

Should be able to remove it in Device Manager

stopper · 25 Jan 2011 at 16:24

Sounds like you need to disable the digital driver assignment. You can do this from the F8/safe mode menu when starting up.
After that, uninstall your video drivers, reboot then reinstall them.

See how that goes.

steinooo · 25 Jan 2011 at 16:42

Pestilence said:
Run msconfig and strip out all of the startup items, and all non-MS services. Apply that, and reboot. See how it goes.

If it loads successfully, then you can start uninstalling stuff.

That sounds sensible I'll give that a go as it's the easiest thing to try first, thanks for the tips and I'll hopefully report back later!

BunnyKillBot · 25 Jan 2011 at 16:51

If you can locate the mini dump im sure somebody on here could debug it for you

Pestilence · 25 Jan 2011 at 16:54

BunnyKillBot said:
If you can locate the mini dump im sure somebody on here could debug it for you

That too. Shouldn't be difficult.

Dirk · 25 Jan 2011 at 17:51

bledd. said:
Should be able to remove it in Device Manager

This. Sounds like a driver issue so use device manager to uninstall anything you can get away with in safe mode. If you can successfully boot up normally after this you can start re-installing drivers.