Is my GPU dead?

[leb]

I've had my system crash and BSOD for a week. When rebooting, a couple of green pixels appear in the bios. The BSOD mentions that

"Attempt to reset the display driver and recover from timeout failed.

*** STOP: 0x00000116 (bunch of addresses)

*** nvlddmkm.sys - (bunch of addresses)

Here is what I tried in safe mode and none of it worked:

- Uninstalled and removed driver from device manager.
- Reinstalled a couple of drivers that I had in backup and were known to work.
- Did the rename/replace of nvlddmkm.sy_ to nvlddmkm.sys.
- Tried with a different copy of my OS from a backup drive.

However it boots with Windows 7 Ultimate's generic display drivers (the ones when I uninstall the device and restarts), and I can up the resolution to 1280x800. It only fails once I install any nvidia ones.

So is the card dead? Is there anything else I could try as I don't have a second GPU else I would have tried it. Why would it only fail with nvidia drivers and not windows?

Thanks!

 

[Timstertimster]

Have you tried loading older NVIDIA drivers? That can sometimes solve problems. But what you describe sounds a bit more hardware-caused.

Can you boot from a recovery disk (not your backup windows but an actual win PE)?

Might just be corrupted system files. Can happen due to disk failure. I would start looking into that first and run diagnostics on your system and check your system disk from win PE.