New
#1
Extra drivers causing startup problems
Let me preface this by saying that my actions over the last couple days haven't been the smartest, and were done mostly out of stupid curiosity. Also, sorry for the lengthy post, but I want to get as much info out there as possible.
This all started when I started having issues with my laptop screen a few weeks ago. Something's wrong with it and the back light refuses to stay on for more than a few minutes (if I'm lucky). Long story short, I got fed up with the issue while waiting for a replacement part to get in, and had this brilliant thought: "Why don't I just stick my hard drive in a different computer and boot to it there?" I figured I could just plug it in, boot it up, and install all the drivers for the hardware that's part of the computer I stick it in. But that's not all! I also figured that it would be cool to just put MY computer into Sleep mode before taking out the HD, so that when I was done using it in the other computer a couple hours later, I could just plug the HD back in to mine and have it resume to where it was when I hit sleep. It must have been late because now I have no idea why I thought that was a good idea.
Surprisingly, this idea seemed to work great. After testing my sleep mode theory by just unplugging and re-plugging the HD into my laptop while in sleep mode. Everything resumed normally like nothing had happened, so I put it to sleep again, took out the HD, and hooked it up to a different computer. It booted up just fine, and Windows was able to install most of the drivers it needed right off the bat. The main ones that were missing were the network drivers, and the PCI controller drivers (or something similar to that).
So I hopped onto a separate computer, pulled up the driver support page for the Acer Aspire 7750Z laptop I now had my HD plugged into, and downloaded the Ethernet and chipset drivers onto a flashdrive. I copied these onto the Acer laptop (after it had already installed the other drivers it could find and restarted without a problem) and ran the setup for the chipset drivers. I don't remember if I also ran the Ethernet driver setup, but I think I did.
At this point the family member that owns the Acer laptop I had been doing all this on said they needed it so I shut everything down properly and plugged the HD back into my laptop. I hit the power button to resume windows like before, and it did so without a hitch, just like before.
But this afternoon, I tried to turn my computer on (I shut it down last night without having any signs of any issue) and discovered a problem: it will boot through the Windows logo/animation, but at the point where it should load the login screen, I get an extremely brief flash of a BSOD and the computer restarts. The BSOD is gone too fast for me to see what it says at all, but I can tell that it's very short (the white text only goes about halfway down the screen).
I've let it run chkdsk at startup like it asked, but to no avail. I've also booted to the installation disk and let it run startup repair a couple times. When I try to do a system restore, it tells me I have no restore points (even though I could have sworn I did). I opened the command prompt and ran bootrec /fixboot and /rebuildbcd with no effects. (I don't really know what these do, but after a google search they seemed like my best bet) When I try to boot into safe mode, it gets up to the loading of driver "CI.dll" and then flashes that fleeting BSOD screen for an instant before restarting again.
Just to be sure it wasn't a sudden problem with my laptop, I plugged the HD back into the Acer again and got the exact same behavior.
My best guess is that installing those chipset drivers onto an OS that already had other chipset drivers is causing this mess, but I'm certainly not very expert in this subject. If someone could tell me how to wipe all the drivers (and make the OS reload them all just like it has to do when the OS is first installed) I think that should fix this problem. Any other suggestions are also appreciated.
I REALLY DON'T want to have to reinstall my OS because I have roughly half a terabyte of programs installed and configured just how I want them, and reinstalling and reconfiguring them all would be a HUGE pain. So that's an absolute last resort.