HD6950 not booting in to Win7

Ok guys.......let me try and explain whats going on as quickly as possible.

Own a XFX HD6950 - System was running a 9800gx2 properly and also ran well with the 6950 until this issue.

After receiving the 6950, I immediately booted a unlocked 6950 bios that also over volted to 1.175. The bios worked well, but would give me plenty of "display driver stopped working" errors while playing Dead Space 2

Tried the stock, xfx 6970 bios, which seemed to run fine as well, except for the same video driver error while gaming.

Tried to return to the stock bios by booting up the system with switch in #2 position and saving the bios via gpuz, then flashing after moving switch to position #1..............but card would not except flash.

After rebooting, card will not boot into windows, unless I use safe mode. Cards hangs at windows loading screen, where the 4 colors swirl around and never progresses.

In Safe mode, I can't get atiwinflash to work as the system tells me I need admin rights to run and win7 safe mode tells me admin right are not available.

Any idea how can try and save this card, beofre I try a warranty claim with XFX?

Thanks for the help.

Dos Flash tool?

OK - Sorry if i'm asking obvious questions.................since I can't get in to windows to run atiwinflash and cant get atiwinflash to operate correctly in safemode, should I use ATIFLASH to flash from DOS?

Looks like v3.79 is the latest, does that even support the HD6XXX series........looks pretty old.

XFX tech responded with directions to clean out old ati drivers...............which I'll try, but seriously doubt that's the issue, as the card was running perfectly before it started hanging on boot. And since it still hangs when the bios switch is in position #2, it begins to look even more like a card problem, not a driver issue.

But I'll try anything at this point.

Latest attempt o flash failed...

OK - might just be a bad card....

Used the DOS boot method, with atiflash v3.79 and the stick XFX 6950 bios found on TPU.......but atiflash -i command returns a adaptor not found message and a atiflash -f -p 0 xxxx.bom command returned a error 0FL01..............not quite sure what that is.

2 more options and I'll be out of options. Read that putting card in different pcie slot might allow atiflash to work........and the other being using another main card with this 6950 in another slot..................but have not yet tried either of these ideas.

Only been about three weeks since I ordered from Amazon..........not sure what their return policy is............I'll check that out too.

Card working again

Very strange behavior, but as others have said, the card works but I hadn't figured out how to make it work yet.

After all the issues and the complete rebuilding of my system, it came down to f8 at w7 load and then instead of safemode, just trying the boot to 640x480 mode.............which then allowed w7 to go out and get drivers.............a simple reboot later, the cards works in 1920x1080 again and the bios reads stock, as I had returned it to before it appeared to brick on me.

Anyways, thanks for those that tried to help and to XFX support. In the end, it just took me and 5 days of thinking and trying to figure out what I hadn't already tried.