nVidia drivers went splat: Can't get any driver to work. WTF?

[Yukikaze]

I was happily running nVidia surround on a 267.x (don't recall exact version) driver with my twin GTX470s and three Samsung 23" monitors and was outputting video to my TV with a 8400GS. Today I powered up the machine and the right monitor showed on image (blinking the "no input detected" error). I tried to disable and re-enable nVidia surround, but nothing helped - The right monitor was blacked out.

I managed to get all three monitors working independently, but I could not get nVidia surround to work. I removed the drivers, swept away all remaining registry crap, deleted the old driver folder, rebooted, downloaded the latest driver (270.61) and installed it with a clean install enabled. Now surround works, but I cannot select 5760x1080. It only lets me 54xx-ish X 1050. Needless to say, that's incredibly annoying.

I Googled up the issue and it seems to be I am not the only one having it. Problem: No solutions are offered anywhere I looked, except for getting each monitor detected independently prior to enabling surround. I tried this, and it did not work.

Someone suggested to try an older driver, so yet again, I uninstalled the driver, then downloaded 267.91 from guru3d. When I try to install it I get the following error: "cannot detect compatible graphics hardware".

W-T-F?!

I am trying yet older drivers now...

Has anyone run into anything like this before?

 

[mlee49]

Complete uninstall within Nvidia's driver installation and then reinstall.

Also, try pulling the 8400GS before doing this.

 

[Yukikaze]

Complete uninstall within Nvidia's driver installation and then reinstall.

Also, try pulling the 8400GS before doing this.

Doing as you suggested with 267.46 worked and also has surround working properly. nVidia must have broken something in the newer driver. Had me scared there, I feared one of the GPUs was going splat.

 

[entropy13]

Have you tried the other way around, using 270.61?

 

[Yukikaze]

Have you tried the other way around, using 270.61?

The other way around?

 

[PopcornMachine]

Must be something else. I've heard from many posters that only Catalyst drivers have problems.

 

[entropy13]

The other way around?

Nevermind. I thought you never used the newer drivers.

 

[qubit]

Must be something else. I've heard from many posters that only Catalyst drivers have problems.

It's a well known fact that nvidia drivers don't have bugs.

Glad you got the problem sorted yukikazi.

 

[MightyMission]

This has happened twice and only since i got 27x.xx beta and whql drivers.
It took me near on 8 hours to get them back to normal the first time!
Last time it only took maybe an hour but its still tedious and unnecesary.

I only went with nvidia because i heard countless horror stories about ati drivers...

 

[slyfox2151]

This has happened twice and only since i got 27x.xx beta and whql drivers.
It took me near on 8 hours to get them back to normal the first time!
Last time it only took maybe an hour but its still tedious and unnecesary.

I only went with nvidia because i heard countless horror stories about ati drivers...

this is the first serious Nvidia bugs in months.

 

[MightyMission]

I havent had any problems with the cards or drivers since i had them(which must be around a year now)then maybe 2 months and 2 worrying fails.

 

[qubit]

I havent had any problems with the cards or drivers since i had them(which must be around a year now)then maybe 2 months and 2 worrying fails.

nvidia are feeling the heat from AMD and are rushing things. Cue the weak power regulation on the 590 and dodgy drivers.

Having said that, I've had no problems with 270.61 and my GTX 580.

 

[MightyMission]

you could be right!
If they are both going to be equal in the crap drivers section then i will save myself some money and go with amd for gpu's next time i have an update.