Dishonored freezing/crashing/not loading. Possibly nvidia related

[Fistandilius]

I think I have everything backed up now except the skyrim mods I have stored, and I'm moving them now. It takes a while to move everything over wi-fi. So probably later on this evening when I'm done running around I'll start attempting this recovery mode thing. I just hope this works.

 

I did start installing my steam games on the desktop pc. I haven't run any of them yet, so I have no idea if they work there. It's crazy how poor Steam's download speeds are, but then I suppose that's because the holiday sale is going on. I tried switching regional servers, but can't seem to get much better than a peak of about 600kb/s.

[Rennn]

I think I have everything backed up now except the skyrim mods I have stored, and I'm moving them now. It takes a while to move everything over wi-fi. So probably later on this evening when I'm done running around I'll start attempting this recovery mode thing. I just hope this works.

 

I did start installing my steam games on the desktop pc. I haven't run any of them yet, so I have no idea if they work there. It's crazy how poor Steam's download speeds are, but then I suppose that's because the holiday sale is going on. I tried switching regional servers, but can't seem to get much better than a peak of about 600kb/s.

 

Lucky... I only get 300 kb/s at the best of times. XD

[Fistandilius]

Well, the good news is after several false starts (things just didn't work the way I thought, I guess) the recovery worked. I now have a clean copy of Windows 8 again. So that's encouraging. My driver is currently 306.14, which is way old, but I'm gonna give it a shot anyways, once steam installs the games 4 days later, lol.

 

I'm sure I'll have a whole slew of windows updates to do as well, although I'm not going anywhere near 8.1 until I'm sure it wasn't the cause. Right now I'm just trying to get my stuff back on the laptop.

 

For anyone else who has a GT series MSI laptop, something that would have saved me lots of time.... The laptop comes with a partition labeled "data". When you do a recovery you have the option to just re-install everything on the OS_Install partition, so I could have potentially backed up almost everything on the data partition and just reinstalled on the OS_Install partition and saved myself a whole lot of time of transfering things back and forth from the desktop over wi-fi.

Edited December 31, 2013 by Fistandilius

[Fistandilius]

Ok. One more update I suppose. My games had finished downloading as of this morning. This time I decided to give FO: New Vegas a go. I went with the old 306.14 drivers figuring I had nothing to lose. I hadn't played New Vegas much. I think I got it for Xmas last year and tried it once just long enough to create a character. So I started a new character and I have zero mods. I was able to play for I'd say nearly 2 hours before crashing with a new error:

 

 

 

The system restarted and I manually rebooted it one more time as I'm never quite convinced things shut down properly after a crash. Next I got to play for about 10 minutes before it crashed with the same error.

 

So I figured what the hell, maybe it was a NV error, so I tried firing up Skyrim. I got a familar experience as I was able to load the game and the character moved about 10 feet in game before freezing up and I had to manually shut down the computer.

 

So I figure ok, I'll try a newer driver, so I upgraded to 331.65, which is the same driver version I have on the desktop. I tried Skyrim and this time the familiar VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE error came up.

 

So I tried to be somewhat diagnostic about it and thought well maybe my saves are bad. I mean afterall I've been experiencing these crashes for some time now. So I fired up NV again. I made it about 5 minutes without a crash until I got the dreaded TDR again. Now for some reason after each of these crashes, windows said it was doing an update when it rebooted and it literally took me about 30 minutes before I was able to get my laptop back again after rebooting.

 

So finally, I tried Skyrim one last time, with no mods and a new character. The screen went black and I heard the audio for the horse and buggy, but no "Bethesda presents" and then a few seconds later the audio glitched out and the TDR came back.

 

I figure I'll post my settings for the hell of it. I can't remember if I have done so before:

 

 

I'm pretty depressed at this point. I wish I knew if it was my GPU or a driver issue, or something else. I will probably post something on the nvidia forums later, but I don't have the energy to care right now. I already e-mailed them my crash dumps twice and they don't have the decency to auto-reply.

 

[Fistandilius]

Someone on the nvidia forums pointed me to this thread: https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/413110/geforce-drivers/the-nvlddmkm-error-what-is-it-an-fyi-for-those-seeing-this-issue/

 

and suggested I try putting some fresh ram in the machine.

 

Skyrim and New Vegas will run on the desktop machine, but with some lag. It has an older quad core and the 550ti, but it's got 16gigs of ram. I haven't tried Dishonored or Alice yet. I don't anticipate problems with Alice, but I've heard that Dishonored can be testy even before I started running into my own issues.

 

Oh, and AT&T sent me an e-mail saying I went over my download allotment for the month after I backed up all that stuff on wi-fi. :rolleyes: They said they would cover it this time but would be sending me e-mails in the future if I start to get close to my 150gb limit. :rolleyes:

Edited January 3, 2014 by Fistandilius

[Fistandilius]

I found out purely by accident that the crashes only occur when my 360 controller is plugged into the usb port. And it's not the port because a mouse works just fine. So I'm guessing there's something defective inside the controller, but I can't prove it without getting another one. Also, I'm not sure why it points to the video driver in the crash data. That seems to indicate an issue where the two are conflicting, but they used to work fine together up until a couple of months ago.