alienware 17 r1 (2013) black screen boot after new driver install

Hello everyone

I own an alienware 17 r1 with windows 8.1, upgraded to a gtx 970m. I did the upgrade in december and worked fine with the driver 359.0 that i modified back then following the video guide . Today I decided to upgrade the driver to the last version, 364.71, and followed the same steps.



After the reboot required by the installer, i see the Alienware logo and then the screen turns black, with only the mouse cursor visible. If i manually shut down the computer and then boot it the same thing keeps happening. I re installed windows 8.1 and tried with the same procedure to install previous version of the dirver, but non of them worked, even the 359 that worked perfectly until this morning. I did all this with windows fresh installed and no updates. I can't download custom drivers from Techinferno post since I haven't posted enough on the forum.



Can anyone please help me?

 

@Ashtrix @thegh0sts Can you help the man?

 

Hey man

You have the exact same issue I faced with my 980m. For some reason, I was unable to install any driver and was getting the black screen of death every single time.
The only thing that worked for me, was to switch from Optimus to Dedicated and use the 364.51 drivers.
I haven't dared update drivers since then...
It is my firm belief that DDU just doesn't clean ALL driver files and what is left behind causes conflicts of some sort... On top of the drivers being utter crap of course...

 

Use 362.00 for now.

Sent from my SM-N910G using Tapatalk

 

I guess he's using Prema mod v1.x.x and the new driver with that vBIOS would be Blackscreen on boot, @Lanius8 use Prema vBIOS v2.0 and install the 362.00 INF from Techinferno thread by J95.

Use Nvdisp inf (PEG driver INF ) as Nick said, Install it after switching to PEG mode - Fn+F5 (Install AW OSD prior the driver installation so that you get access to the PEG mode switch). And never switch back to the stupid optimus mode.

 

Someone posted a thead with supposedly a way to "fix" Optimus:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/optimus-fix.790679/

I personally won't bother trying it as I am happier without it.

@Ashtrix
I was on prema v2 when I got my black screens so that's not the (only) cuplrit. I honestly tried EVERYTHING to get my 980m to work and I thought I had gotten a bad apple from woodzstack (had RMA'd my old one and was installing the replacement).
The only thing that worked was dedicated mode and I happened to be trying 364.51 at the time... Like I said, I am not in the mood to be bullied by Nvidia so I am not going to update my driver for a while. These drivers are working for me and that's good enough for me...

 

Ok guys I installed win 10 yesterday night since win 8.1 was too much f***ed up, I couldn't even load a recover point. After installing all the updates available for win 10, this morning I installed the last Nvidia driver (364.71), wich I modified personally, and everything worked well. Thank you all for your help

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...eforce-drivers-v364-72-findings-fixes.789930/

 

sounds like you need to flash prema's v2 vbios then install 362.00 and don't install any other nvidia driver version unless someone here gives the green light to do so!

 

I already installed driver 364.51 after reading papusan reply, and it looks like it's working fine. Why would I need a Vbios?

 

if you're using the stock vbios and you're not overclocking then you're ok. but if you do overclock then you need to have the vbios flashed in order of it to work correctly since 361.xx as there was something in the drivers that caused it to not work with v1.1.1

but, lets face it, if you're here you're most likely will overclock anyway.