Stuck with no boot and no video driver in Win 10 Tech preview


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Brand new Dell XPS 8700 with Nvidia GT 635 video card. The Win 10 preview was running fine until last week when Windows Update pushed had a new video driver. Since then I have multiple issues -

 

- major glitches and redraws in the UI. No option to rollback driver

- The latest version of drivers from Nvidia didn't work

- monitor wouldn't wake up from sleep (the pc was still on). The only solution was to power off the pc

 

I then tried a driver from Dell's site which was a few months older. Now my pc just boots to a black screen with no UI. I can't get into safe mode either.

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Maybe the driver isn't being cleaned up properly.

 

Have you tried cleaning with DDU ?

 

Try to initiate a system repair via a windows USB?

Can you tell me more? I don't have the USB anymore but can make another one. I tried booting into advanced mode by holding down shift, Windows started diagnostics and showed me 'troubleshooting', but there's no safe mode option in there or a way to uninstall drivers, is there? I only see Refresh/reset/boot from usb etc.

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Another thing I noticed was Windows Update kept failing trying to install a display driver, and kept eating up disk space. It turned out that the Driver store had hundreds of copies of the same Nvidia driver and kept on adding more continuously, eating up all disk space left. I then had to use Driver store explorer to remove these just so I could get some disk space, and manually ran the installer.

 

If I can get to safe mode, I'll try DDU, thanks. There are some programs whose data I really want to save, which is why I don't want to do a refresh just now as that will wipe any non-Metro app data.

 

At this point I'm thinking of going back to 8.1, having your pc down for 2 days is no fun.

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If you can get into CMD via troubleshooter or via a Windows USB you could try to restore your registry to an earlier point.

 

http://www.nullskull.com/faq/49/recover-windows-registry-when-no-restore-point-or-backup.aspx

 

Windows keeps a week old copy of the registry.

 

Interesting that you are having display driver issues. Are you by any chance using 9888?

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If you can get into CMD via troubleshooter or via a Windows USB you could try to restore your registry to an earlier point.

 

http://www.nullskull.com/faq/49/recover-windows-registry-when-no-restore-point-or-backup.aspx

 

Windows keeps a week old copy of the registry.

 

Interesting that you are having display driver issues. Are you by any chance using 9888?

No. I think its 9879 or whatever it got updated to recently. This is the first MS beta I've had trouble with and maybe Nvidia is to blame for their ###### drivers.

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Tried to restore driver/registry, didn't work. Then I disconnected my monitor connected via hdmi and plugged an old dvi monitor back, and now Windows boots up. At this point I'm afraid to update the driver or use my new monitor because it might end up in the same unusable state as before, and that sucks. 

 

Why don't I see a rollback option in the video driver, and why doesn't Windows automatically try the previous 'safe' driver on boootup. Every version of Windows has done both of these.

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Most likely because you have deleted them from DriverStore :D.

 

This is an Interesting issue.

 

You can try to install the Windows Standard VGA drivers onto your Nvidia device.

 

Or clean with DDU in safe mode.

 

Then bootup .. replug your new monitor and try to install an Nvidia driver from MS Update or Nvidia.

 

Low Res Mode during bootup:

 

https://www.winhelp.us/low-resolution-video-vga-mode-in-windows.html

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