Sudden system hangs all week long

It’s rare that I run into something I can't wrap my head around, but here we are. Since I’m not exactly claiming to be a genius or some kind of tech wizard, I figured I’d ask if anyone else has dealt with something similar or has any thoughts 😬 regarding my situation:

Conan was running perfectly fine. Automatic updates on, zero issues, everything was smooth. Yesterday, I shut down the machine around midnight, all good. This morning? It starts up, hits the POST, shows the Windows logo, and then—black. It stays powered on, the drives are spinning, but absolutely nothing happens.

Safe Mode works fine, though. No hardware errors, no malware (Norton and Security essentials have been keeping things clean for a while now), Malwarebytes finds nothing, and neither does CleanMyMac. I’ve tried all the standard recovery stuff—system restore, repair—nothing works.

During one of the repair attempts, I got an Error Code 0x490—likely something involving the boot/MBR. Ran Geek Squad to fix it, but still nothing. The Event Viewer is packed with logs, but they’re all empty. Only two specific Error Codes showed up: 278 and 279.

I read somewhere that SentinelOne can sometimes act up. I uninstalled it and wiped it clean, but no change. For the record, all my drives are in great shape—all green. Temps are also perfect; that’s never been an issue (even with the GeForce GTX).

In one of the Blue Screen of Death instances, I saw a mention of atikmdag. I killed the CCC processes, cleaned everything out, and lo and behold—it boots up normally, just stuck in 800x600 VGA mode. Windows immediately notices the missing VGA driver and tries to install it. Once it finishes, it asks for a restart, but once I reboot, we’re right back where we started. Okay, fine, maybe it’s the latest beta driver. No big deal. I wiped the CCC files again and manually installed the version from late last year that worked flawlessly. Fuck... we're back to square one. Same symptoms...

Back to Safe Mode, kill CCC, wipe everything, prevent Windows from installing any VGA drivers, and suddenly everything runs fine again. I even managed to set the native resolution on my Dell Monitor (1680x1050) and get my fonts and icons back to how they were. Everything looks good, but obviously, there's no Aero interface and a massive hit to graphics performance because there's no hardware acceleration.

So, that's the situation. It's working for now, and since I desperately need this machine for web browsing and Microsoft Office today and tomorrow, I'm done messing with it for the moment.

Next, I’m planning to open the case, clean everything out, reseat all the connections, and try a different DVI port on the card. But honestly, logically, I’m thinking the GPU is the culprit. It’s not that old, it’s never really been under heavy load (my son games on a different rig), and it has the stock dual-fan setup. It shouldn't be dead yet, IMHO...

I'd appreciate any opinions, suggestions, or advice you might have... because regardless of how many years of experience I have, this one is proving to be a pretty tough nut to crack.

Thanks in advance!

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The build is a Sunbeam Quarterback with 3x120mm fans, a GA-MA770-UD3 motherboard with an Intel Core i7 running Ninja 3, 4x 2GB Kingston RAM, and a GeForce GTX (stock with dual fans). Power supply is an EVGA Power Supply, drives are HD502IJ / WD1001FALS / WD5000AAKS, monitor is a Dell Monitor 22" 1680x1050, and it's running Windows 7 x64 Enterprise.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...fcce665?page=1

I’d probably stick to the same approach you’ve taken so far. It’s an interesting rabbit hole, though; maybe we'll actually find something useful here.

It’s possible Windows Update just completely botched something 😬 If not that, then it might be a hardware issue. You could try swapping out different power cables for the GPU or HDD, just to rule things out.

One person in that thread mentioned they have two setups—one with the latest update and one without. The one without the update works fine, while the other is hitting the exact same wall you are.

I’ve got a bit of a half-baked theory here, though I can't say for certain if it applies to your specific situation.
It actually happened to me twice—right after updating my Nvidia drivers (not with AMD, by the way)—where my PC would just freeze right at the Windows login screen after a restart. To be more specific, sometimes it was a total black screen, and other times it looked like a shrunk-down desktop with nothing but the logo sitting in the middle of a sea of blackness, completely unresponsive. After I went through the whole exhausting cycle of reinstalling drivers, running repairs, and all that fun stuff, I finally realized the culprit wasn't even the PC—it was the TV connected to my graphics card! During the boot process, the system was detecting two displays, and for some reason, it was trying to push an image to both—either in extended mode or cloned mode—and things just glitched out. It probably flagged the TV as the primary display, or maybe it was struggling with mismatched resolutions or aspect ratios... who knows, it was a mess. Anyway, the fix was surprisingly simple: while the computer was powered down, I physically unplugged the TV from the graphics card so only the monitor remained. Once I did that, Windows booted up perfectly fine. Then, once everything was fully loaded and running, I plugged the TV back in, and it recognized it without any drama. Everything worked smoothly after that.
It doesn't sound like an exact match for what you're experiencing, but if you have multiple displays hooked up, it might be worth a shot. Who knows, it might help someone else out too.

Probably some junk left over in the registry or somewhere... run CCleaner to wipe the registry, or you can just hunt it down manually. Find the exact name of that GPU driver file, nuking it from the drive first, then hit Disk Cleanup to clear everything out before you finally install those fresh drivers.