I normally say no, but now I have to say maybe. That is because I have had seen a video_tdr_failure caused by a SSD firmware bug. The SSD firmware took too long to respond and windows attempted to reset the driver but then got a video_tdr_failure bugcheck. (it was a mix of two or three problems)
- if your old HDD is involved, you should see a the windows disk subsystem attempting to reset the port that the drive is connected to. (you would see this in the eventlog, only if the reset worked, otherwise the log would be in a buffer when the machine bugchecked and would not have been written to disk)
most of the video_tdr_failure problems are just bugs in the video drivers that cause a deadlock. (one process waiting for permission to continue but never getting the permission) Video drivers tend to have poor error checking because they want to work very fast. This can lead one piece of the driver hitting a error condition and blocking the other 2 threads. It ends up causing windows to panic and attempt to recover by reseting the card. When that does not work all windows can do is bugcheck.
Windows 8.x will attempt to check your drive and make repairs where it can. It will find places on the drive that are still readable but produce errors on the read, it will read the data off, move it to a new place and mark the old cluster as bad. But a spinning hard drive has a known failure rate that just adds up over time, I think it is something like 25% during the first year and 16% failure per year until it dies after about 5 years the failure rate goes way up.
Windows 8 should help extend the life of these drives but they are doomed to fail just based on how they are designed. (they will just fail faster on windows 7 because people don't check them until they system actually fails to boot, windows 8 checks them a little bit at a time when the system goes idle, and moves your data before the cluster is totally unreadable)
I have retired my spinning drives on my systems. They still work and I have plugged them in to make backups but they are on a shelf now. I found that the only thing i really care about is my photos and I have backups on DVD and the cloud. (and on my old hard drive, if i ever get around to doing the photoshop work on them)
I now have various SSDs in my system at least when they wear out I can still read the data off them even if I can not write to them.
cscrille :
johnbl :
I would recommend that you use the current windows 8.x and the current windows 8.x graphics driver and use control panel device manager to disable the graphics driver sound support in device manager. Do not uninstall the sound support, the PNP system will just reinstall for you. If your problems continue, I would disable any low power modes for the graphics processor in the control panel power management. If that does not help, I would reduce the the graphics processors and memory overclock by 25Mhz or to the default reference card values. This is what the makers of the driver will have tested against. If you really want to know the exact cause of the problem with the driver you will want to run verifier.exe and turn on deadlock detection on the graphics driver. The system will bugcheck when a deadlock condition is encounter. It does not fix your problem but it does confirm that is its a software timing problem with the driver.
The last time I took the effort to really look at this, it looked like windows attempting to preload a screen saver into graphics memory and not getting permission to do so by the graphics adapter. Kind of brought the system to its knees for a stupid reason. (disable screen changer to avoid the condition in that case)
- If you do go back to windows 7 Make sure you reboot before and after you use the OEM graphics adapter update program. (just a heads up, to prevent a common problem)
- Also, the new graphics drivers hit known bugs in the old windows 7 system, these bugs require that you install the service pack and the windows update to prevent getting bugchecks every few hours with the new graphics drivers. (again just a heads up to prevent a common problem)
cscrille :
johnbl :
There are many reasons why a video card will not respond, some are hard caused by hardware
(thermal issues, overclock issues, Card overclocked, or PCI bus overclocked, and power issues)
The hardware problems will still show up when you boot with out windows. for example, you can boot memtest86 on its own CD and run tests to help Isolate problem from problems with windows.
if the machine works as expected when booted on a test CD, then you need to work on why windows is having a problem. There are many causes for this and it is best to start with the machines BIOS, reset the defaults and reboot. The BIOS will pass a database list of all the hardware to windows, and windows will try to use that info, in needs to be correct but the BIOS does not rebuild is database until you change hardware, or update the BIOS or reset the BIOS back to defaults.
Next, you look at why a video card stops responding. PCI bus speed issue, the BIOS reset should have fixed that. Cooling: you get graphics corruption on your screen, lines and such most of the time and. Low power, you machine will bugcheck with certain special error codes or it will simply reset and start back in the BIOS.
Now, most of the time if you don't have a physical problem you have a problem with device drivers. You update them and you get blocked because there are no more updates to be had. If your system hangs, the screen locks up, it is not corrupted, but does not refresh you most likely have your software for your video card in a software deadlock. one process locks access to some data, while the other process wait there turn to get access. They never get access and your system hangs. Graphics cards run games, and the driver has to be as fast as it can get. One way they do this is by having the minimum amount of error checking. Windows may detect that the graphics driver stopped responding but the graphic software is just waiting for another part of its own software to release its lock so it can continue.
What you can do: these errors are timing dependent, you can change the timing and change the rate at which you hit the error in the code. One way to change the timing is by going to the control panel device manager and disabling the high definition audio for your graphics card. this audio is provided for you HDMI or display port cable to allow your monitor to have speakers. if your monitor does not have speaker the graphics card is processing sound for no reason and you can actually speed up your graphics by telling the card not to process sound. And you don't have to worry about and sound driver conflicts with other sound sources.
(web cam sound, motherboard sound, pci sound card,...)
anyway, hope this helps.
Am certain it isn't a physical issue. The GPU is new and has been in use for around 2 weeks if not less. Regarding cooling issues and overclocking, the name of the gpu is "Asus 660 DirectCU II OC Edition", therefore, physical retail upgrades shouldn't also be causing any issues. I myself haven't done any additional upgrading (overclocking, etc).
When I've installed an OS on this current build for the first time and applied the newest driver at the time, it was working fine until the creation of this thread, when I applied an older driver.
I've recently launched in safe mode, uninstalled my gpu driver and then was able to access my desktop normally, however, without an nvidia driver on board and running on standard vga. The black borders around my desktop indicated that there was no video driver at presence. The issue did not occur. Nevertheless, the device manager states that there is a video driver installed, even if I have uninstalled it in safe mode. Assuming the gpu has a default driver pre-installed and every time you uninstall it, next boot it will already be there.
Towards my conclusion, it seems that the issue is caused by the presence of nvidia drivers (although, it's weird that it was function fine for some time at the very beginning) and not by gpu's performance.
I also assume that switching to Win7 (what I intend to do in the near future) would possibly solve this issue. I am on Windows 8.1.
Could my '09 HDD influence towards the issue?