Display driver atikmdag stopped responding and has successfully recovered. BSOD

Posted on September 5, 2009 Updated on September 20, 2009

Update 20 sep 2009:
Well things didn’t turn out as easy as it was expected to solve, after a week, bad things were getting started again, red dots/lines were showing from BIOS to windows, BSOD all the time when entering windows (could only logged in using safe mode). Finally gave up and I went back to the shop last weekend. and it’s confirmed by the tech support that the GPU was somehow corrupted and they said that it was pretty common for that particular brand :| since it was considered as 3rd grade (wish i knew about that really). Went to the distributor just across the building and out of luck again, they didn’t have ready stock for the replacement, so I need to wait for another 4 weeks, in the mean time I was given a temp VGA card (downgraded version of the current one). however the tech support guy told me not to have too high on hope eventhough i get the replacement, it might just as well happen again :| well, it’s time to save money to get a more decent card if/when it happens again *sigh*

It’s been quite some time that i haven’t encountered BSOD (blue screen) and need not to tell you all, it really sucks. Hey, it’s 2009 now and yeah it’s still around alrite.

It started a week back and last night was the worst, it hang then BSOD after just logged into windows. I thought it was the existing win7 O/S problem, then after trying other O/S even installing another new win7 O/S, the problem remained the same. I stayed up until almost 4AM looking for solutions and nothing seems to work, finally gave up (if i start opening the case, then it will be a sleepless night :p)

So after woke up this morning (actually afternoon), i started opening the case and tried quite a lot of things (reseat the vga, clean up the base plate, rearrange the cables, etc). finally after i switched the vga to another slot, it seems to be working fine (at least until this moment writing the blog post :p)

Well hopefully that resolved the problem for good, and i really hope it won’t show up if i ever use dual monitors.

One thing that quite surprised me was the amount of pages found in the net which are mentioning this problem with the vga (both ati and nvidia seem to have the same issue), a good one can be found here.