My black screen boot failure conundrum: the GPU, Windows 7, the Mobo or the Virus?

limogeas

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System: Win 7 ultimate, MSI R9 270 GPU, ASRock p67 extreme4 mobo, 2500k cpu. initial build in 2011 with the gpu upgraded later when the predecessor was getting tired.

From the top, this started when I decided to play BF4 for the first time in many months. immediately upon loading the first game, I got a very brief wild image distortion of the green and blue with white code-text variety and the system crashed.

When restarting, after I see the windows logo on booting I get a black screen with no cursor and no intractability. My only option is a hard reset. Booting into safe mode works. restarting in safe mode things seemed okay, did some googling and thinking about the course of events and figured it was my video drivers, though I had not updated them lately. uninstalled, reinstalled. Issue persisted. In safe mode I deleted the GPU driver from the Device Manager and restarted without installing new ones and was able to boot outside safe mode and make it past the black screen to the desktop, albeit with vertical bands alternating normal and slightly off/artifacty appearance (that were also present in safe mode). the system is able to detect the gpu and automatically install the drivers, but when drivers are installed and the system restarts, black screen as before.

In safe mode I ran a virus scan and did find a Varpes type Trojan which I believe I was able to take care of. Issue persisted.

Having been able to get a change of some kind by deleting the drivers in safe mode I figured video card issues were still my likely culprit, so i switched out the R9 270 for my brother's old XFX Radeon HD 6670 and installed the appropriate drivers, issue persisted.

At this point I was getting fed up, thinking the GPU hardware seems to not be the problem, maybe the virus is not as gone as I'd like or did some damage to the OS. So I boot in safe mode and save my files to my portable and proceed to reformat/reinstall windows 7; just clean slate things (with the R9 270 back in, since the 6670 didn't help, why not?)

Installed all new drivers/updated windows, and the issue is still there, unchanged, booting with video drivers installed gives a black screen after the logo, booting in safe mode works (though there are still thebands of vertical distortion that may or may not be related to anything since i'm running without AMD drivers....)

I'm well past my level of technical capability and would appreciate any ideas from the community. Seems a hardware issue given the fresh OS? Motherboard?

Thanks for reading my novel,
-Alex.
 


Was Win 7 Ultimate and BF1 both purchased or obtained legally?

Have you tried a different cable?

Have you tried installing in the next PCIe slot?

The Win 7 reformat suggests a virus isn't the underlying issue. Successful Windows reinstall suggests virus isn't the cause.

Have you tried your 2500K's integrated video? Remove card and plug cable directly to motherboard's video connection.
 
Sounds like you might have a mess of old GPU driver remnants hanging around.
Try the DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) from guru3d.com . Do what they recommend and run it in Safe Mode.
Then after rebooting in Regular Mode install the latest video drivers from the AMD website.
Try this and see where you are.
 


A clean OS install would mean no remnants imo.
 

limogeas

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Thanks for the suggestions. I gave another PCI slot and a different HDMI cable a try, logged in with things looking the same, installed the Radeon driver, and restarted to the black screen again after the windows logo ---> restarted to safe mode. Both BF4 and Win 7 Ult are legal copies. I would have liked to try the 2500k's integrated video, and had considered that a selling point when i bought it, but I derped as this was my first build, the motherboard I selected does not have a video connection for integrated video.
 

limogeas

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Thanks for reading and the thought. I think I got rid of that possibility with the clean install, I went with a reformat and brought no files over. should be a totally clean slate I believe