Dammit, my M18x R1 went down again.......

My computer went down and could not booting normally anymore last evening after a sudden crash.as i was not doing anything special at that moment. Actualy it had been only 1 month since last time my 18 (in short of m18xr1) got recovered back from un-bootable issue by means of installing an old version of graphics driver (sorry i cant remember the version).

So basically ,the problem is a booting issue, my machine will just stops response at the windows loading screen when the last moment before welcome screen. And safe mode is still accessible . so of cause i thought it would be a kind of driver compatibility problems or something like that, so i tried to install loads version of drivers include all dell drivers i can find :

(8.902-111012a-128052C-Dell_ZPE.exe ,
8.851.2, A02 8/9/2011 6:16:46 AM,
8.8.51.2, A00 7/29/2011 10:45:46 AM,
8.80.6.1, A01)

and latest AMD official driver which i download from amd.com. Anyway, the problem was still there after i reinstalled those drivers. ( i was installing those drivers with standard 2 steps , 1 boot up with safe mode,delete graphics cards in device manager, 2 rebooting with no-graphics driver, then uninstall rest of AMD related with un-installation manager in control panel.)

I had tried to restore windows to initial state by recovering from hidden section a month ago.it was of no avail.I also performed hardware inspection at system startup by pressing F12. everything went well.

An other interesting senario was ,I tried to disable one of my cross-fired 6970 graphics card (i tried doing same on each of them,no diffrence), then the machine was able to boot-up,however, after entering desktop, everything was going incredibly slow , i would spent even 20-30 seconds on opening "my computer" or control panel. That situation gave me an impression that could it be possible that something went wrong with power supplier related on mother board??

If anyone had witnessed a similar issue with your 18r1 and resolved ,please sharing some your experiences would be appreciated!!


Blandon from London

 

And i may add,the spec of my machine : m18x r1 ,8gb ram,2 * 6970m GFX cards,2* 750 gb seagate 7500rpm sata.

 

I believe this is the driver for your GFX cards, and this could very well be a driver issue. Also in my experience, that windows restore crap screws up your system even more then it was mostly then fixing that it fixes problems, I never ever use it and even have it turned off.

Do the following:
- uninstall ATI Catalyst Control Center and everything it installed
I recommend using download from Guru3D.com for this.
You might have to do this in safe mode, as you can't really boot up to windows ^^

Download the latest driver for your cards on the ati website, and install it.

Let us know if it's solved.

 

Hi jiggymf,Thank you for your response. The windows recovering thing i mentioned was not "windows" restoring , i did a Alienware spawn (or something like that) recovering from a disk image which lives in a hidden partition,which means that my entire partition C had been formated again and installed a pure operation system again,however, the brand new recovered windows was still not accessible.

I will try to use the tool that you recommended to reinstall the driver anyway, hope that tool would make difference.:hi2:

 

As you mentioned that the system is loading into safe mode and when you disable the crossfire configuration it will boot into windows, it sound to me could be an issue related with one of the video cards. Run a PSA test to check the hardware on your system if no errors arise, please let us know.

 

I was away from my machine , just had a chance to tackle it this evening.i re-installed the latest driver which downloaded from AMD ,and did the thorough PSA test,. none of exceptions appeared so far,same issue keeps happening at its partial moment.Anyway, finally i got this bloody machine booted "normally" by means of disabling one of the pair of 6970ms. i guess it would probably be something broken in crossfire cable or one of those graphics cards. Just dont have mood to handle that yet and im gonna just sleep on it.

Hopping with one strong leg is better than none,isn't it.





Thanks again for these comments from you guys.


Best Regards


Blandon

 

In all of my experiences, if you can't boot without disabling one of the cards, your assumption is correct. One has given up its ghost.

I find it quite odd that there are four or five different threads going on right now about failed AMD GPUs.

 

Yeah LOL I just installed 13.1 on my CF 6990 machine. Working great so far. Haven't had an amd card since way back in PII days. I remember there were driver issues even then. I don't know how many machines were sold with this configuration,at the price point not many so even a few failures are significant. Main reason why I extended warranty on this machine and not on M17's