Radeon HD 6850 won't boot

[flangyflange]

My tech-savvy fellas,

I need your help on this one. Days ago my good old GT9800 died (it began with graphic errors ingame and ended with graphic errors in the bios boot screen). So I bought a Radeon HD6850. Installed it today but the bloody thing won't work: Boot screen looks okay but when I choose Windows it hangs completely, when I try to boot Linux the screen just turns black and the gfx-card fans turn up to the max.

I doubt it's a driver issue (that's too soon in the boot process I'd guess) - in particular Linux should boot even if it can't find a suitable driver for the card, but the machine just hangs.

Things I've tried/checked:

The card sits tightly in the slot. The additional power plug is connected. The PSU delivers 530 Watts, should be enough, right? I tweaked around the BIOS settings. I did load the default BIOS settings in the end. The Mainboard is a Elitegroup GF8100VM-M5 (V1.0). Yes, there is a BIOS update available but the respective changelog says nothing whatsoever regarding gfx-cards, just additional CPU support. I googled a lot yet haven't found anything really conclusive .....



Anything I could check / try?

[ionwg]

can you confirm if you GPU requires 1 or 2 additional 6 pin connectors? I ask because most require 2

[flangyflange]

There is only one connector

[MegaYoda]

If you have a spare formatted HDD drive lying around you might want to unplug all your original hdds and just plug the spare one in and try and see if that works ok by installing windows again! might be worth while just to see if it's your GFX card or some sort of conflict with your original HDD files and drivers

A long and painful process of elimination

[Schlack]

I think ive identified your problem

[flangyflange]

Yes Yodels, made some progress: I could boot the machine using KNOPPIX (a Linux running from DVD) so there seems to be no hardware issue. So maybe my Linux is doing something the gfx card doesn't like when it brings up the boot screen and my Windows installation is just fucked up

[LK3da]

did u try to boot windows in safe mode and uninstall the nvidia drivers and then reboot to get the hardware newly detected!?

[flangyflange]

did u try to boot windows in safe mode and uninstall the nvidia drivers and then reboot to get the hardware newly detected!?

Problem is that I don't get past the screen where I can choose between 'safe mode', 'normal' and such. Whatever I choose at this point, the machine freezes. Seems I got to reinstall Windows .....

[bambam]

* does the mobo have a default VGA? If so you could take the 6850 out, boot to VGA, de-install anything that looks like it was installed by Nvidia or ATI, and have another go installing the 6850.

* take out the 6850 and install in a different slot

* I don't know how you've connected the PCI-e 6-pin power but if there are choices try a different power source - presumably the GT9800 was single slot mobo power only.

There is, of course, the fair possibility the HD6850 you've bought is fuked

[flangyflange]

There is no other slot I could put the ATI into (it's a cheap MoBo). The ATI is connected to the PSU the same way the old card was.

I tried the default VGA as you suggested, BamBam (with the ATI card out): Windows won't boot even this way, so I reckon it's fucked up beyond any repair, possibly caused by all the crashes the dying old card gave me. Linux, however, does boot using the default VGA.

I'm currently trying a repair installation. Let's see if this works out.

Cheers for all your help,

Flange

[shutteh]

or try a knoppix boot cd and you can start a os without any installation and you can see if the pc works or not.

[Gavac220]

Also makes me think you should get a 3rd party to try your old/new car. Perhaps all the problems had nothing to do with your grfx cards in the 1st place?

[flangyflange]

@shutty

I did try Knoppix (see above). It did work, no boot problems and no graphical errors at all (with the new card).

@gavac

Good suggestion, I will try the old card in a different machine to make sure. Though the graphical errors with the old card appear right after turning the PC on (these look like an irregular grid layered above the screen contents). I haven't had these errors with the new card or the on-board VGA. I guess it's highly likely the old card is fucked. And if not, in the wake of BF3 I was thinking of buying a new card anyway ^^

[Sayril]

Use driver cleaner pro and unistall all drivers, then reinstall them.