Installed Secondary HDD, Screen Now Flickers on Startup

TVeblen said:

ItchyAlgae said:

I doubt it's the monitor. It did the same thing with the newer monitor last night.
Test 1: No, it takes quite a while to come up. It never used to.
Test 2: It comes on immediately.

Did you write that backwards? Because Test 1 result above shows a problem with the monitor.
If the PC is up and running and you can see the image on the monitor, then you turn off the monitor and wait for it to cool down, and it takes a long time to show that same image again when you turn the monitor back on - that's a problem with the monitor.

That's what I would have thought too, but it did the same thing with a brand new monitor (tests 1 and 2), which also flickered.

Thought of that one too. I tried a mix of old and new DVI and HDMI cables on both monitors and it didn't change anything.

TVeblen said:

Well that narrows it down a bit to EITHER the graphics card or the graphics driver.

So let's try this. I"m going to have you do a 2-part clean install of the driver.

• First, go to the AMD website and download the most current known good driver for your video card. Save the file where you can find it.
• Next, go into Windows Explorer and in the (usually) C: drive find the Program Files > ATI folder (inside will be Drivers > and your driver version) and delete it (the whole folder).
• Next, Go into Start > Control Panel > Remove a Program and uninstall all programs for the video card. Do the actual driver last. For AMD, you may be able to select “AMD Catalyst Install Manager” and click on “Change”, then “Uninstall All Components”.
• Restart the computer.
• When the computer reboots to the desktop Windows will install it's own generic WDDM1.1 driver and you will be asked to restart again. You must do so in order to install the new Drivers > Restart.

At this point you should run the computer with the Windows generic driver for a while. See if the flickering stops.

If it does, then you could try installing the newest AMD driver from your download.

Let's see what you find.

AMD Instructions > go to Windows 7 section:
How-To Uninstall AMD Catalyst Drivers From A Windows Based System

So I uninstalled everything through Catalyst Install Manager, deleted the AMD folders, and it asked me to restart. I did, the flickering was a little less pronounced but still there upon start up, and when it booted to the desktop it didn't do anything else. If it was installing generic drivers, it didn't alert me. It didn't ask me to restart again. I searched the system for WDDM1.1 but the system didn't find it.

Here's what I've got. No WDDM1.1 but both an AMD and ATI driver listed. There's no option in Windows Update to download WDDM1.1 either. I also want to extend an in-progress thank-you to you and everyone else who's taken the time to help me out with this. Absolutely the right way to grow a real community here and I very much appreciate it.

Nothing is up with that second one that says ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series? I thought it might mean something is redundant or duplicated where it shouldn't be, since AMD retired the ATI brand sometime after I bought my card