Question PC seemingly died after driver Installation and BSOD ?

Shanklesbread

Honorable
May 23, 2017
22
0
10,510
Hi all! I was helping my friend the other day with her computer build, and all was going fine until she rebooted her PC after installing drivers. Long distance tech support, so what she can do is limited (and she's not confident to go rooting around inside her PC). She's got a bit of an older machine, but nothing so old that I thought would cause any problems.

Her specs:
AMD FX 8350
16GB Ram
850 Watt PSU
I don't know her board, I think it's made by Gigabyte or MSI - her pc originally was a prebuild from CyberPower. It's definitely old, cause the BIOS is copyrighted 2005.
GTX 1070 (My old GPU that I gave to her).
250GB SSD
2TB HDD

What happened was when she went to reboot her PC after installing drivers, Windows gave her a BSOD (it compiled and closed too fast to give the error message), and now when she attempts to boot her PC- the fans whirr up and the LEDs on the graphics card power on - but nothing else. No KB, no Mouse, no monitor signal, not even a POST beep.

I've advised her to do a full CMOS reset once her friend is able to help her - but I wanted to ask it here: Would that help, or does it look like we may have a dead board/CPU?
Thank you all in advance. I will post an update if anything new occurs.
 
Last edited:

Shanklesbread

Honorable
May 23, 2017
22
0
10,510
curious if it starts if you remove boot drive.

Updating drivers shouldn't kill a PC.

what drivers did they update?
Interesting. I'll see if that does anything-
And a lot. For sure her Nvidia Driver for her GPU, and a bunch of other outdated utility drivers. We did it just after we installed Windows 10.
Thank you for the info!!
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
other option is remove GPU and boot off internal one, just to see if its not the GPU drivers.

which utility drivers? sound/lan? where did she get drivers from? Her board so old its likely win 10 has drivers for most of it.
 
Try to boot in safe mode.
F8 at startup gets you there.
Safe mode starts windows with only essential drivers.

If you have a suspect driver, reinstall it and test.
Hardware rarely fails. It would seem that one of the installed drivers was bad.
Try reinstalling the drivers one at a time to find the bad one.
 

Shanklesbread

Honorable
May 23, 2017
22
0
10,510
other option is remove GPU and boot off internal one, just to see if its not the GPU drivers.

which utility drivers? sound/lan? where did she get drivers from? Her board so old its likely win 10 has drivers for most of it.
I'll give her that too. And I think both? She got them from Driver Booster - and Windows 10 had drivers for everything at start but most were outdated (according to driver booster).
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
She got them from Driver Booster - and Windows 10 had drivers for everything at start but most were outdated (according to driver booster).
it thinks my GPU drivers are old even when they are brand new. Its not good software to use, it can get things wrong and make things worse.
Driver Booster can kill windows but I am pretty sure it can't kill hardware. All it can do is install wrong drivers.

Might need to get PC to boot off USB while hdd attached.
One possibility is to run system restore off the USB as Driver Booster should have created a restore point before installing drivers so maybe we can get back into windows.
  1. change boot order so USB is first, hdd second
  2. boot from installer
  3. on screen after languages, choose repair this pc, not install.
  4. choose troubleshoot
  5. choose advanced
  6. choose system restore
  7. pick a date before the drivers were installed, or if lucky, one made by DB before it installed drivers
  8. PC should restart and roil back system to that time.
this only works if hdd attached at time.
 
Last edited:

DavidM012

Distinguished
It's the gpu. Switch off power at the wall and take it out straight away without trying to power on the system.

The cmos battery usually needs a new one in older systems. The power draw of the 1070 is likely too high for an fx mobo.

If you have an old low powered non gaming gpu around you can install that and see if the system will POST once the cmos battery has been renewed.

If it doesn't POST the mobo is likely cooked.