Unable to start in safe mode or normal - Win 7

Hi
I am having some serious issues which I am 99.99% certain are not malware based.

I have an Asus motherboard (P5N-E SLi) that has a single nVidia 8500GT graphics card on.

I have been running this system without issue for ages now.
However, for some stupid reason I decided to see if there was an update for the graphics card and installed a "game ready" update yesterday. The installation went fine and the system appeared to work ok without issue.

However, today on booting I noticed that the bios splash screen had a load of dots on it (like the resolution was wrong) and the system would not boot up. It would get past the bios screen and then hang with a black screen and moveable cursor, then reboot in a loop.

I decided to go into safe mode and roll back the drivers, which I was apparently able to do (so the system told me).
However, the bios dotted screen is still there, and now I am unable to boot into any of the safe modes or normal mode - all result in a black screen with moveable cursor.
When trying to run into a safe mode all the drivers appear to load,and then it hangs.

I have available the Windows 7 Installation disk, a 32 bit Repair disk and HiRens Boot CD (feb 2013).

My details are:
Asus P5N-E Sli
8gb Ram
nVidia 8500GT
Win 7 Ultimate

I'd appreciate any help getting this back up and running asap.

 

Forgot to mention:
When I get to the black screen with cursor in any of the Safe Modes, if I press shift loads of times it comes up with the Sticky Keys dialogue box. My options are just "Yes" or "No" and whichever I choose doesnt alter the black screen with cursor issue...

 

Richard,

A BIOS update may solve this.

Call Asus and they will walk you through it - as any mistake you make on your own could prove costly.

Have the serial # of the board handy.

812-282-2787

Good luck,

Paul

 

Hi Paul
Thanks for the reply. Do you know of any way to access/repair the video driers before I go down the BIOS update route?

 

You can go to Device Mgr and right click and click -Update drivers or go to the mfrs website.

 

My issue is that the system is hanging at a black screen with a cursor and I'm unable to get into any of the safe modes or normal boot up. That means I cant get to the device manager or anything else

 

I was just responding to your question about updating drivers - sorry.

I would call Asus as I suggested.

 

Okay thanks...

 

Ok, updated BIOS to the latest version (1406 from 0703) and still the same issue.

Booting normally I go through BIOS, and then the Loading Windows bar (on a black background) then just a black screen.

The BIOS screen still has lots of dots on.

I'm stuck...

 

Using Hirens Boot Cd I can run a version of mini Windows Xp that lets me access the drive.
However I can't run an uninstaller for then latest nvidia experience drivers that I I installed and caused this issue.

Is there anything else I can do while running that which will remove the drivers?

Also, I can get into a command prompt by using the recovery CD, but again I don't know what I can do from there...

 

Further updates (but still not able to get past a black screen with cursor):
I have re-installed dual graphics cards in an SLi configuration, and this appears to have resolved the BIOS dotted graphics issue.
When I try to boot into normal mode, I now get the four coloured floating windows logo - but from there it just goes to a black screen with a moveable cursor again. And again if I click shift 5 times I get a turn on sticky keys window appear.

I have restored the registry files (SAM,SOFTWARE,SECURITY,DEFAULT,SYSTEM) from C:\Windows\System32\Config\RegBack to C:\Windows\System32\Config but that has had no effect.

I have tried multiple times to "Repair" windows but although it says it has completed repairs nothing changes.

I have tried System Restore using 4 known good restore points, but each one fails with an unknown error.

 

Would putting a new graphics card in bypass this issue and load me into windows?

 

Booting from Hirens using MiniXP I can see that there is a folder on C: drive called temp which has another folder within called NVIDIA.
In temp are the following files:
bcdinfo.txt
bootfailure.txt
disklayout.txt
SrtTrail.log
SrtTrail.txt
t.txt

I dont know what these files relate to?
I did try to run a driver install on the c: drive from within minixp so that may have been where they came from.


I also have an NVIDIA folder on the C:\ drive which has a list of five DisplayDriver folders in.
Is there anything I can do to these folders to restore older drivers manually?