7970m won't kick in after cold boot. Need help reinstalling 13.9 mobility driver

Hi,

I have a radeon 7970m in my sager laptop and recently when I boot up my windows 7 64 bit, the graphic will not kick in when I run any games even when they all set on high performance. I usually had to restart the windows a few times to get it finally to go back to run on 7970m. I did something different this time and after a cold boot, of course the graphic card isn't kick in when I ran my game, I went in catalyst controller and set my game to power save then back to high performance and then it would run on 7970m again. Anyhow, I figured something is wrong with the driver so I decided to re-install it. This is when the trouble begins.

So, I googled proper way to uninstall the ATI driver and was following the steps. Step one - go to add/remove program and uninstall catalyst install manager. I went in there and found no such thing in my program feature to uninstall. I was like fine, I will go download the 13.9 driver again and I believe that will let me uninstall it. So, I went to ATI site and go through the driver search, Notebook Graphics -> Radeon HD Series -> Radeon HD 7xxxM Series -> Windows 7 - 64 Bit. So, it takes me to the usual place and pointed me to this file AMD Mobility Radeon Driver Verification Tool. Clicked on download and ran the program. It then asked me for the Destination Folder which I left it default (C:\AMD\Catalyst_Mobility_64-Bit_Util) Now everything seems fine and it's saying the software is ready to download, so I click on "start download button" and save it to my desktop. The download finishes it in under 2 sec which I found it odd because I know the install exe is over 150mb. The screen is telling me AMD Catalyst Mobility has been successfully downloaded. So, I checked the file size and it gave me a 46.6 KB exe file which when I click on it, it tells me that this software is not compatible with 64 bit windows system and wants me to make sure I have 64 bit windows which I do. I used the same download and worked fine before when the 13.9 was first released.

I'd like to mention this a few days ago I wanted to try 13.11 beta to see if it gives any performance boost on final fantasy 14 and ended up crash the game immediately so instead of uninstall the driver and re-install 13.9. I stupidly used system restore to go back to 13.9 and I think that may be why catalyst install manager isn't showing up in my program feature list for me to uninstall.

So, now I'm sort of stuck at can't download the 13.9 and can't use 13.11 beta because it crashes final fantasy 14 when I ran it. I tried to use 13.11 installer to uninstall the catalyst and it's telling me it can't do so because some .dll is missing. I'm having a big mess with this ATI driver. All the place I found on google that has 13.9 driver pointed me right back to ATI site to download and I do not want to download the driver from untrustworthy sites also.

The system is in a sort of working way. As long as I gets the graphic card to kick it either by restarting machine until it does or go in setting and mess with it until it kicks it. It is very annoying to have to do so every time after a cold boot. I do not want to risk getting rid of all the ATI files and ended up unable to get back to 13.9. I don't understand why ATI driver is such a hassle that you had to manually remove so many files after the install manager uninstall the software. Why can't they just make their installer go in and clean up all the junk they left behind?

Anyone knows what I should try or why is the mobility driver isn't downloading for me, other than tell me to reformat and start over (which I probably need to do so sooner or later)

Thanks

 

Do you have a system image you can go back to? I always have one for my laptop because these AMD drivers are such a PITA. Maybe give driver fusion a shot? Some members have reported success with it.

 

I actually found the 13.9 set up file in C\AMD\support and used that to reinstall and uninstall the driver and cleaned everything out and reinstall the driver. Still every now and then when I start from cold boot, it will not run games on 7970m until I go to change the game to power saving then back to high performance. However, I tried to download that 13.9 again from AMD site and it is still giving me the 46.6k files. Can anyone verify that they can download the full 13.9 set up file for win 7 64 bit? It is odd that it won't let me download the full file.