Black screen of death and odd BIOS text coloring

Today was very strange as I spent most of it troubleshooting. I powered down my comp last night for the first in awhile and booted up later in the day only to find something odd. During the bios boot up screens the text had an odd look to it. Every two letters would be white, then every next two letters would be brown. e.g. "press a key to continue" would be colored: WWBBW W BBW WB BWWBBWWB. Afterwards the xp loading screen would ensue yet I could still see a similar brownish color in the text throughout loading. Then after the load screen, I get no output from my videocard and I get a black screen of darkness for all eternity.

After troubleshooting I decided to re-install video drivers and uninstalling a Windows Theme app which I expect was the cause, things seem to be back to normal. The bios text during bootup are all white once again.

I've been unable to find anything about the bios weird coloring that indicate a system error and am wondering if yall know of anything like this. Thanx.

Also I've got a bunch of sys errors in my event viewer that i'll try to sort through and post. Most of which I've never seen or heard of before such as:

NVidia driver:
The driver nv4_disp for the display device \Device\Video0 got stuck in an infinite loop. This usually indicates a problem with the device itself or with the device driver programming the hardware incorrectly. Please check with your hardware device vendor for any driver updates.

Source 'sptd':
Driver detected an internal error in its data structures for .

It appears your video drivers were somehow corrupted, i.e. nv4_disp.sys which is an Nvidia display driver. We take it that since the video card driver reinstallation everything is running smoothly, correct?

You may want to check to see how well your card is seated.

well it's been happening again after a day of solace. i really don't have anymore info except during bootup bios screens the text is still varying in color but sometimes it's also like there some interference and abruptly shakes or fuzzes until after the windows logo when all is lost including video output. Ive cleaned and reseated my video card also.

I spent most of the day backing up in prep of a reformat but I am still unsure if this will be a fix. This has all the symptoms of a faulting video card, though I spent the entire day in Safe Mode and everything was fine - which makes me think its drivers corrupting though I have reinstalled them many times.

Yes, it sounds like it is the video card failing. Your description of texts of varying colors, etc. sounds like what is called artifacting meaning either the card is overheating or dying. Since this even occurs at boot-up when heat isn't an issue it appears a new card is in order.

Thanx Route44 I think your right. My system has been running fine for a week or so and today I decided to run a test by loading a game, and everything went kaput again. Am currently looking into a new card. I posted a thread in the A/V thread if yall have any suggestions. Thanks again R44.

Thanks phonb for getting back to us. One cheap way of determining if it is a video card is to install another one before purchasing. of course this means you or a friend have an extra one lying about or said friend will allow you to borrow his card for diagnostic purposes.

Sad to say I do not have an extra card to test out. Though I'm prepping to format my system to see if that helps before ordering a new card. Whats peculiar to me is that I have no troubles running in safe mode on the 'Vgasave' adapter/driver. Is that a fail safe way of a display adapter to work in case of component failure? Also am I killing my monitor (Samsung SyncMaster 906BW) by running in 800x600 while in safe mode? lol

No, you aren't killing your monitor. Being able to run in Safe Mode is a very strong sign that the issue is driver related.

I have suspected driver issues also but I have tried every version for my card there is. I have some minidumps that I found that may help diagnose whats happening.

All four error codes are the same 0xEA: THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER
A device driver problem has caused the system to pause indefinitely (hang). Typically, this is caused by a display driver waiting for the video hardware to enter an idle state. This might indicate a hardware problem with the video adapter, or a faulty video driver.

All four cite the same Nvidia display driver as the cause: nv4_disp.dll

Try this: Uninstall the card and check the gold plated tabs that insert in the video card slot on the motherboard. Are they "dirty"? If so take a pencil eraser and gently clean them off and reinstall.

How is the video card's fan: clean or full of dust? (I'm sure you've already cleaned but just in case...)

I cleaned the card again and cannot see any imperfections on the tabs. The fansink stopped working awhile ago but I've been closely monitoring the temps so I don't cook it.

Also, I am able to boot in vga mode though if I try to up the resolution from 640x380 the system crashes in the same manner. Is there a way to make the card boot with windows drivers instead of the nvidia one? I'm more and more convincing myself that I'm having driver issues though what's peculiar is I can't up the resolution or color depth in VGA mode.

Edit: I googled the nv4_disp.dll 'infinite loop' error and got a textbook worth of information. Most people had problems years ago and my card is dated so I'm hoping that the solutions they suggested will help. So far I updated my bios and rolled back my display drivers but no luck yet.

The fansink concerns me.

Looking forward to see if any of the research helps you. It may be time for a new card.

After updating drivers for my Intel chipset the problem seems to be solved. Possibly some of the newer drivers from Nvidia were conflicting with the old chipset drivers. I'll be holding off on any 3d applications for now and see how things progress. My system is over 3 years old so myabe i'll wait until I can get a new one. In case of any problems I'll post an update but hopefully I can consider this matter closed. Thanks again R44, for now at least your help saved me from buying a new card.

Excellent! :grinthumb Good diagnostic work on your part and good summation of probable conflict between the newer Nvidia drivers and your older chipset drivers.

So it was drivers afterall, just not the ones we thought. :stickout:

Looks like the solution was only temporary, after hours of normal computing I'm back to the crashes. Everything ran fine in the normal startup of xp though a new symptom arose which I think points to the card failing. After a few minutes of video playback (any format and resolution on any media player) the video started to flicker and shake. I found out that my video settings were set to 2 displays that are cloned. I promptly set the setting to one and the problem vanished. An hour later while simply navigating explorer, crash nv driver endless loop again. What makes me think now the card is the culprit is video playback worked fine but only momentarily. Looks like I may end up ordering a new card, bumski...

Your current card is a PCI-Express, correct?

yes it's an MSI Nvidia geforce NX7600 gs Pci-E

there is another option. bake your video card in your over. i know how that sounds, but search for bake video card.

its a little out there, but if you are going to just throw it away why not. i have 9800 gt im probably going to try this on, ive got a little testing left to do but it seems likely mine is shot

and i can tell you ive had 8 customers bring me OCed video cards that i tried this method on. it worked for 3 of them.

phonb, what is your budget? It should not cost that much to replace.

My budget is limited, but i can afford the cost of replacing the card. Though I need to be sure it is a faulty card and not something else such as a power supply, mobo, or hard drive. I've already tested my Ram and is error free thru 26+ passes. I'm still trying to diagnose why text in my Bios after the initial boot screen is half white and half orange. Just as Bios beeps can diagnose a problem I think the colored text means a certain error.