Intermittent Startup Freeze after Video Driver Update

[MSchild]

Hi,

I am working on a laptop for someone, and I am in a bit of a predicament. When it was brought to me, I was told that the owner was having a problem where the screen would pixelate to black, and then the display would come back up with the little popup message in the system tray saying that the display driver crashed and that Windows successfully recovered from it.

So I saw that the display driver was the WDDM 1.1 driver, which was probably the one Windows found for it when it was originally installed. Well Windows couldnt find an updated one automatically so I used my trusty program DriverUpdate by Slimware, which is the paid version of SlimDrivers (I know it sounds gimmicky, but theyre a MS Gold Partner). Anyways, that found that not only the display adapter but a half dozen other drivers were out of date, such as some motherboard controllers and chipset drivers. I went ahead and made a restore point and updated them all.

After rebooting I have this problem where, quite intermittently, the machine just freezes completely during startup, at or around the login screen. I can get into safe mode ok, and so I enabled boot logging and went to look at the logfile. It looks like there are lots of drivers that are not loading, but reading closer its the display driver trying to load over and over again. The odd thing is that when it doesn't freeze, the machine runs fine for long periods of time. I was downloading and updating software, and even ran the Windows benchmarks with no problem. Needless to say, it has be a bit puzzled.

Normally I would roll back the driver, but that driver is faulty as well. Any suggestions guys? I can post the log file if you think it would help. This is an HP Pavilion dv6-1245dx running Windows 7 HP x64. TIA!

View attachment ntbtlog.txt

 

[bassfisher6522]

Delete all the current graphic drivers and then reboot, it should reinstall the factory installed gpu driver for you. If not then download the original driver from here....



Software & Driver Downloads HP Pavilion dv6-1245dx Entertainment Notebook PC | HP® Support

 

[MSchild]

Thank you! IDK how you found that; when I went to the HP support site it said no model found for dv6-1245dx, only a dv7-1245dx, which uses AMD graphics, not Intel. I even downloaded their browser plugin for chrome and IE and it said it couldnt find any HP hardware lol. Well anyways, hopefully this gets it sorted. Ill try your first recommended method, but Im downloading the driver just in case.

Thanks!

 

[MSchild]

Well I uninstalled the display adapters and after that the screen went blank, as expected. I hit the power button and Windows got the signal and shut down, and when I powered it back on it was running low res with a "standard vga adapter" installed for the video card. I ran the installer from the link you provided and everything went ok. It needed a couple reboots after the install, and then it all seemed to work fine.

One reboot later and I am back to square one, with the intermittent freezing at or around the login screen. I am quite baffled, and am not sure how to proceed. I am stuck between three choices: 1) A low res driver that is not WDDM compatible, 2) An older driver that is WDDM compatible but frequently crashes, and 3) The newest supported driver straight from the HP website that causes this machine to freeze during startup.

I think this is the same driver then that DriverUpdate had found. I can delete the boot log and then re-enable logging and post the logfile of a single startup that results in a freeze if you'd like, but if it is indeed the same driver, I am guessing it won't contain anything the other logfile didn't. I appeal to you, gurus!

 

[bassfisher6522]

It could be a missing or corrupted system file....run sfc /scannow in a cmd prompt and see what it finds.

Use the System File Checker tool to troubleshoot missing or corrupted system files on Windows Vista or on Windows 7

 

[MSchild]

Ran sfc, found no integrity violations /: I am at a loss. I even updated the BIOS (which Id skipped because the fix only applies to models with AMD graphics) but I still have the same problem. I am pretty close to throwing the MRI in there. Ive already run Trend Micro Rescue, Kaskpersky Rescue, and MBAM. *sigh*

EDIT: As an update, I am running MRI now. It has passed everything so far, which is the CPU, RAM, Video, and Motherboard. It is currently testing the HDD, after which is just a general system stress test, so I think it's pretty safe to say at this juncture that there are no hardware issues. I will update this again though when the diagnostic completes.

EDIT: The MRI diagnostic completed with no test failures.