Confusing problem

[Marrowwind]

Hey, I recently built my friend a computer and we're having a bit of trouble. I put everything together at my house and tested it for about 2 hours or so before shipping it off to him, but when it arrived at his house and he set everything up we ran into a weird problem.

At first, the computer would turn on but it wouldn't read either of his two monitors, I told him to keep unplugging and switching the DVI/HDMI cables to the computer and monitors, then just to plug one in and we got his 1680x1050 monitor to read off the HDMI cable. Everything booted up fine, bios screen, windows logo but after the windows logo the screen remained black. I told him to restart it a couple of times to see if that worked and nada. We got on skype and he used his laptop to show me everything he was doing. After a few restarts I told him to try to boot up via safe mode and it worked. He could surf the internet, open programs and the only problem that the computer was having was between the monitor and the graphics card. I told him to go to display to see if he could change his resloution because he defaulted to 680x480, but all his options were grayed out and under graphics adapter there was nothing there.

We installed his 6850 drivers even though I had already done that after I had finished the build. When trying to install we got "failed to load detection device" but after an hour or so we got rid of it and I complete forgot how :x. After installing the 6850 drivers, we restarted and got the boot screen, windows logo and even made it to the desktop. The only problem was that the monitor colors were completely off; On the windows logo, the words at the bottom were red and on the desktop there was red lines and all kinds of different anomalies. Keep in mind none of this had showed even a little in safe mode. I told him to uninstall via the device manager, restart and try to see if we can boot in normal mode. It booted up fine, but the colors were still completely messed up and all of his options were locked out in display settings, except for color which we could change to 16bit or 32bit but it changed nothing at all. I told him to go ahead and install the drivers again, maybe it'll work this time because he is in normal but this time when we restarted we got a BSOD that said something about the display driver timing out, I really don't remember, but we restarted in safe mode to uninstall the drivers.

We spent about 7-8 hours on this problem yesterday and this is the best I could summarize it up. We got it to boot in normal ONE time without weird colors, but as soon as he changed his resolution it messed up (I actually didn't tell him to do this, I told him to install the drivers first because we had gotten this boot without them) We've switched monitors, switched inputs, uninstalled drivers, reinstalled drivers (even for the monitors) and all we get is a mix of BSOD, black screens after windows and extremely messed up desktop colors with all display options locked out.

For his build, we had reused his hard drive so the first time everything booted up together after being build was on my monitor and that's when I installed the drivers. I think the problem lies somewhere in that, because the drivers don't want to work with his monitors at all. We even tried windows restore but it just ends up with a black screen after the windows logo after restarting. I also think the problem would be fixed if we could reformat his hard drive, but we don't have a CD and he's a dumbass and doesn't have a legit copy of windows 7, so the HP_Recovery partition is useless because its for windows vista so we when tell windows 7 "Hey just reformat off the image" its like "wut??".

Thanks for the help.

[Marrowwind]

Oh where oh where has my little dog gone, oh where oh where can he be

Mod Warning. Don't bump your own threads. It is an infractable offense.

[OhpUldum]

You said it yourself. You reused his old hard drive without doing a clean installation of Windows after building his PC. You more than likely have a driver corruption causing the repeated BSOD and lack of entering Windows. If you want to solve this issue format the PC, reinstall Windows, install the motherboard drivers, then install the video card driver. Otherwise you're just wasting time.

[Deleted]

what... You didn't do a clean install on a new computer...
Try that first, it's like that one time a help desk tried to fix broken USB ports by moving the HDD over to another, exactly the same laptop.

Bottom line, it didn't work. ALWAYS do a clean windows install, you don't even have to format the HDD, just put it in, let it install and all your files will be in c:\Windows.old