“Display driver stopped responding and has recovered” error.

I have been struggling with this issue for months now. My original video card was a Nvidia GTX460 ... thinking this was the problem I changed it to an ATI Radeon R6850 but to no avail ....same problem. My conclusion is the driver stopping or TDR is the SYMPTOM of the problem not the cause.

However had a breakthrough today when I caught the "crash" with the Afterburner graphs open .. screen shot is here

to explain

1 - fired up rfactor racing sim, GPU memory & core speed come up from idle to 1100/860 mhz respectively

2 - 4 seconds later the spinner appears and GPU shoots to 100% as usual then....

3 - 9 seconds later, screen goes blank (but audio still running ok in background)

2 - 2 seconds later screen reappears back at spinner...MSI graph shows GPU usage drops to 0%, memory & core drop back to idle as does voltage. Message on at bottom of screen reads usual driver has stopped responding but has recovered. System then continues as normal as you can see fro mthe screenshot the program is happily running in the background

System is a Intel i3 CPU 530 @ 2.93mhz with 4gb ram running windows 7 64bit service pack 1. H55m-UD2H motherboard latest F11 firmware. Graphics card is MSI AMD Radeon HD6850 1gb running lates 11.12 drivers. Power supply is a corsair GS600 and the whole PC is only 12 months old. Memtests show all is ok, voltage test show all ok & you can run furmark graphics test all day too withouth inducing the problem.

Somebody somewhere must know what all this means and what is causing it........

I've just installed a Radeon 5450 card in my 9-month old Dell Inspiron to replace the integrated graphics and this problem appeared every 10-15 minutes afterward.  Took me nearly 2 hours to solve it.

 

The solution (at least, for my machine):

The card's driver set-up program includes Catalyst Control Center, which supposedly looks after the card configuration.  BUT - IT DIDN'T UNINSTALL THE EXISTING VERSION!  After several re-installs of the software that came with the graphics card, including upgrading to v11.12, I did some checking and found that Dell's pre-installed version was still live and active, so the two of them were conflicting!  No wonder there were problems.

After completely uninstalling v11.12 and all drivers associated with it, I then used the Win7 Control Panel to uninstall the original Catalyst Control Center program, and then re-installed v11.12.  All has worked fine since.

This might  explain why many people have had this problem with different configurations, if their machines have a pre-installed version of CCC.  Surely ATI's software should detect and remove an old version of CCC, regardless of its source, before installing the new???  Hardly rocket science.

 

I'm not saying that this will solve all instances of this problem message, but once I spotted it there was little doubt that it was at the root of mine.

Thank you for this solution. I have a one year old Dell, also with a Radeon 5450 card. I have been experiencing the same problem with the video driver failing and recovering while I was using IE9, usually while scrolling or following a link. After a couple of long and unproductive calls to Dell's technical help, I persuaded them to manually un-install the video driver and then re-install the new one along with the Catalyst Control Center.

That seems to have done the trick. The new video driver is now properly installed, and the problem has not re-appeared – at least not this past week!

Thanks again.

The only answer i've found was to buy a new card although haven't received it yet so to be honest i dont know is it's the real solution.

SOLUTION:

I just got my replacement card from Athlon Micro. I installed it and boom! It's working perfectly. I've tried everything I could to get the error message again but have gotten none. Looks like it was a hardware issue with the card.