Windows 10 Display driver stopped responding and has recovered

JohnL97231 · Jul 7, 2016

For the past few days I've been getting the "Display driver has stopped responding and has recovered" error. Screen goes black for a while and when it comes back the error pops up.

I fear my graphics card is broken, but I hope not. My laptop has one of those switchable graphics boards. An Intel onboard one (power saving) and a Radeon 6600M (high performance). I only get this crash and error when trying to run applications that I have set or the system has set to use the high performance card.

I've tried updating the driver but this card is no longer supported and Windows says I already have the best driver.

I also tried this registry fix, but it didn't work:

1. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers
2. On the Edit menu, click New
3. Select QWORD (64-bit) value.
4. Type TdrDelay as the Name and click Enter.
5. Double-click TdrDelay and add 8 for the Value data and clickOK.
6. Close the registry editor and then restart your computer for the changes to take affect.

A few days ago I tried a System Restore but it failed, and then it created more problems. Suddenly my OS (C drive only had 5GB of free space left. I remember I had a lot more free space before. Then after I tried undoing the System Restore, it failed again and left me with about 300MB of free space on (C. I did a Disk Cleanup and only managed to regain 2GB of free space. With each reboot of my laptop, I seem to be getting back more free space on (C. Now I have about 5GB of free space. I don't know how to free up more space on (C.

I've meaning to do a clean install of Windows 10 since I upgraded from Windows 7 but I only have an expensive mobile data connection. I need to download 8GB of files? I simply don't have that quota right now. But I can buy it and it'll cost me RM30. I also don't have a thumb drive big enough at the moment. I don't think I can use my external HDD? I've tried the Media Creation Tool with my ext HDD plugged in but it said "compatible device not detected." Now with only 5GB of free space left on (C, I can't even download the files. How do I get the Media Creation Tool to download to my (D partition?

I only started getting this error after updating my PC on the 24th or 25th of June. I got the dates based on the System Restore point. But now System Restore says I have not created any System Restore points. As mentioned, I only have mobile data so I don't constantly keep my PC updated.

Sigh.. really hope it's not the Radeon that is broken...

Neemobeer · Jul 8, 2016

Well first off low disk space on your OS partition (C) can cause all sorts of problems. Looking at your logs I see that your system is having a lot of issues during paging (When data is swapped between memory and page file) if you right click on the "This PC" icon > properties and go to advanced you can try moving your page file to the D drive and see if that resolves your issue. This would also free up several GBs of space on your C drive.

The application block message may be coming from your AV software, I would test disabling your AV and re-launch the program.

JohnL97231 · Jul 8, 2016

Here are the logs.

One was created before I had another error message, another was created after triggering an error by trying to open a video with Media Player Classic, an application set to use the high performance card (Radeon). But no dump file? I checked that settings were correct.

And eyy... guess what? I tried opening a file through Media Player Classic's menu, and it worked, despite getting the error and another new error message (see the screenshot I attached). Seems to be a problem with my DirectX?

Also, the registry fix seems to have had an effect? I received this new error message (see attachment). I guess my Radeon card is not broken after all? But how do I get games to run if this error message pops up?

Neemobeer · Jul 8, 2016

Well first off low disk space on your OS partition (C) can cause all sorts of problems. Looking at your logs I see that your system is having a lot of issues during paging (When data is swapped between memory and page file) if you right click on the "This PC" icon > properties and go to advanced you can try moving your page file to the D drive and see if that resolves your issue. This would also free up several GBs of space on your C drive.

The application block message may be coming from your AV software, I would test disabling your AV and re-launch the program.

BIGBEARJEDI · Jul 8, 2016

I agree with Neemo, and another issue is that if you are attempting to repair your PC using Windows in-place upgrade or a Windows reset from built-in recovery software that won't work!! Win10 needs at least 9GB of free space or more to do either of these OS level repairs. If you've got that little space left on a modern disk drive; say on a 200GB drive; that's less than 2.5% free space. Windows has serious problems with anything less than 10% free space. So that C: bootdrive you have is operating in the "Red-Zone" or "danger-zone" for sure. Windows normally won't operate at anything less than 25% free space on a bootable C: drive partition; that's a max of 75% space used of capacity. If you have a 200GB drive with 5GB free space; that's 97.5% space used of capacity!! BAD-BAD-BAD!!

By the way, please tell us the exact Make/Model of your Hard Drive, Make/Model of your PC or laptop. I don't know what you've got on that C: drive, like maybe a 150 games, and you only regularly play 3 of them; but you need to uninstall some stuff from that drive bro'!

I would suggest that you get yourself a large usb external drive such as 500GB or larger and pull off all the library data (such as documents, photos, music library, videos, movies, old E-mails, etc.) and get them off your C: bootdrive. If you don't have at least 25% free on your C: drive after that, even if you manage to somehow upgrade your PC to run W10; you're going to have continual problems with windows until you fix this and give windows the space it needs to perform it's internal housekeeping. There are literally thousands of articles and books written about this issue you can google if you don't believe me.

That's where I would start.

<<<BIGBEARJEDI>>>

JohnL97231 · Jul 8, 2016

Neemobeer said:
Well first off low disk space on your OS partition (C) can cause all sorts of problems. Looking at your logs I see that your system is having a lot of issues during paging (When data is swapped between memory and page file) if you right click on the "This PC" icon > properties and go to advanced you can try moving your page file to the D drive and see if that resolves your issue. This would also free up several GBs of space on your C drive.

The application block message may be coming from your AV software, I would test disabling your AV and re-launch the program.

It seems that my page file is already on (D) drive. Under settings, paging file size for (C) is None. I can't seem to take a screenshot to share it with you. Is this a Win10 feature?

Looks like I'm screwed.. I was wondering why I couldn't take a screenshot so I tried a restart and then my PC froze during boot up. Put a pillow on the power button and suffocated my PC lol, then when I got to the login screen and entered my PIN, my PC restarted itself. Wth?

Tried turning of Avast's shields and still received the error message.

JohnL97231 · Jul 8, 2016

BIGBEARJEDI said:
I agree with Neemo, and another issue is that if you are attempting to repair your PC using Windows in-place upgrade or a Windows reset from built-in recovery software that won't work!! Win10 needs at least 9GB of free space or more to do either of these OS level repairs. If you've got that little space left on a modern disk drive; say on a 200GB drive; that's less than 2.5% free space. Windows has serious problems with anything less than 10% free space. So that C: bootdrive you have is operating in the "Red-Zone" or "danger-zone" for sure. Windows normally won't operate at anything less than 25% free space on a bootable C: drive partition; that's a max of 75% space used of capacity. If you have a 200GB drive with 5GB free space; that's 97.5% space used of capacity!! BAD-BAD-BAD!!

By the way, please tell us the exact Make/Model of your Hard Drive, Make/Model of your PC or laptop. I don't know what you've got on that C: drive, like maybe a 150 games, and you only regularly play 3 of them; but you need to uninstall some stuff from that drive bro'!

I would suggest that you get yourself a large usb external drive such as 500GB or larger and pull off all the library data (such as documents, photos, music library, videos, movies, old E-mails, etc.) and get them off your C: bootdrive. If you don't have at least 25% free on your C: drive after that, even if you manage to somehow upgrade your PC to run W10; you're going to have continual problems with windows until you fix this and give windows the space it needs to perform it's internal housekeeping. There are literally thousands of articles and books written about this issue you can google if you don't believe me.

That's where I would start.

<<<BIGBEARJEDI>>>

Dell Inspiron N4110. 500GB WDC WD5000BEKT-75KA9T0, split into 2 equal partitions, (C) and (D).

I'm perplexed about the loss of free space too. As I can remember, there was a lot of free space on (C) and I did not download anything huge to (C). Most of my downloads go to (D). All my games are installed on (D). Program files on (C) take up about 12GB max (I've checked). I've got some not so important documents on (C) but not big enough or numerous enough to take up so much free space.

Maybe I have a virus? Maybe a ton of Windows Update files are stuck on (C)?

Sigh.. as it seems I guess my Radeon card is ok? I guess the best way to go about this is to finally do a clean install of Windows 10? Guess I'll have to ask help from friends who have an unlimited broadband quota and go looking for a thumb drive.

I'm down to slightly more than 4GB of free space on (C) again for no reason.

Is there a way for you to go snooping on my HDD to find the problem? I don't have a lot of incriminating files. Just a bit of porn on (D). Ehem..

kemical · Jul 8, 2016

JohnL97231 said:
But no dump file? I checked that settings were correct.

The reason why you might not be seeing any dump file creation could be down to you having such a full HDD. As the guy's above point out your system will not run as it should so do follow their advice.

Your dump file will probably be a Bugcheck 116 and basically means the gpu driver tried to reset but didn't respond within a given time. These are also called 'TDR's (timeout, detection and recovery) and can be caused by a multitude of things. I've often discovered though that it can be simply corruption and a good clean can make all the difference.
Use the display driver uninstaller to remove the original driver as this also removes anything left behind by previous installs:
As for the driver I checked AMD's pages and they have a legacy driver here (beta):
Link Removed

Or try using the driver found on your lappies support page at Dell.

Neemobeer · Jul 8, 2016

One trick you can try to free up space. (You could potentially break the ability to repair or uninstall currently installed applications and windows updates.) I have used this before, so I know it works.

Create a directory on the D drive, call it installer
Copy all the content from C:\Windows\Installer to the newly created installer folder on D (Installer folder is system hidden)
Delete C:\Windows\Installer

Open an elevated command prompt and type

Code:

 MKLINK /D /J "C:\Windows\Installer" "D:\Installer"

Now if you click on the link C:\Windows\Installer it will still appear to be that path to Windows but really points to D
Go into Control Panel > Programs and Features and do a test repair on any application, it should still work. (Don't repair office if you have it, it's install data is located in a different location)

JohnL97231 · Jul 8, 2016

kemical said:
The reason why you might not be seeing any dump file creation could be down to you having such a full HDD. As the guy's above point out your system will not run as it should so do follow their advice.

Your dump file will probably be a Bugcheck 116 and basically means the gpu driver tried to reset but didn't respond within a given time. These are also called 'TDR's (timeout, detection and recovery) and can be caused by a multitude of things. I've often discovered though that it can be simply corruption and a good clean can make all the difference.
Use the display driver uninstaller to remove the original driver as this also removes anything left behind by previous installs:
As for the driver I checked AMD's pages and they have a legacy driver here (beta):
Link Removed

Or try using the driver found on your lappies support page at Dell.

I did.

Installed CCleaner and cleared about 3GB plus of space. Most of it were System Temporary files and the rest were browser cache files. Kinda disappointed. I thought by now this problem with temporary files I've been facing since XP would be gone by now. I have a Lumia 535 and it doesn't have a problem with temporary files taking up too much space, which is one of the reasons why I love Windows Mobile over Android. But I guess Windows works differently on PC?

And ooh.. I was going to write about how I transferred my petty files from (C) do (D) and still only have 13GB of free space on (C) but then I uninstalled Killer Instinct and it freed up almost 60GB of space. Wth? This game was that big? I couldn't even run it smoothly lol. It took a lot of bandwidth to download it which was why I didn't want to uninstall it, but I totally forgot how big the game was. Silly.

And good news. The error is gone. Here's a new log.

JohnL97231 · Jul 8, 2016

Neemobeer said:
One trick you can try to free up space. (You could potentially break the ability to repair or uninstall currently installed applications and windows updates.) I have used this before, so I know it works.

Create a directory on the D drive, call it installer

Copy all the content from C:\Windows\Installer to the newly created installer folder on D (Installer folder is system hidden)

Delete C:\Windows\Installer

Open an elevated command prompt and type

Code:

MKLINK /D /J "C:\Windows\Installer" "D:\Installer"

Now if you click on the link C:\Windows\Installer it will still appear to be that path to Windows but really points to D

Go into Control Panel > Programs and Features and do a test repair on any application, it should still work. (Don't repair office if you have it, it's install data is located in a different location)

Since the error is gone now, do you still recommend I transfer the Windows Installer folder to (D)?

JohnL97231 · Jul 8, 2016

Hey, unrelated question, can I create a Windows 10 installation media on a normal size DVD? Windows Media Creation Tool says if I create one on a USB flash drive, I'll need at least 3GB.

kemical · Jul 8, 2016

Still no dump file. Make sure your settings are like this:
Open the run application.
Type sysdm.cpl in the run box and click ok.
Look across the top of the system properties box for 'Advanced' and click that.
Look for 'Startup and Recovery' near the bottom and click 'settings'.
Near the bottom you'll see a drop down menu under the heading 'write debugging information'.
In the drop down menu choose ' small memory dump (256KB)'
Under 'small dump directory' make sure it says %SystemRoot%\Minidump.
Click ok and your good to go.

JohnL97231 said:
Hey, unrelated question, can I create a Windows 10 installation media on a normal size DVD? Windows Media Creation Tool says if I create one on a USB flash drive, I'll need at least 3GB.

Yes.
DVD's are around 4.5gb.

JohnL97231 said:
create one on a USB flash drive, I'll need at least 3GB.

You'd be better off with just over 4GB like the DVD's

JohnL97231 · Jul 8, 2016

kemical said:
Yes.
DVD's are around 4.5gb.

You'd be better off with just over 4GB like the DVD's

Alright. Thanks.

Neemobeer · Jul 8, 2016

It's up to you, it would probably free up 10GB+

JohnL97231 · Jul 8, 2016

Neemobeer said:
It's up to you, it would probably free up 10GB+

Link Removed

JohnL97231 · Jul 8, 2016

kemical said:
Still no dump file. Make sure your settings are like this:
Open the run application.
Type sysdm.cpl in the run box and click ok.
Look across the top of the system properties box for 'Advanced' and click that.
Look for 'Startup and Recovery' near the bottom and click 'settings'.
Near the bottom you'll see a drop down menu under the heading 'write debugging information'.
In the drop down menu choose ' small memory dump (256KB)'
Under 'small dump directory' make sure it says %SystemRoot%\Minidump.
Click ok and your good to go.

Ooops, I did not see the top part of your reply. I checked the settings and it should be correct. Can't take a screenshot so attached is a photo. Tried running the log application again but it said it couldn't find the dump file so I didn't bother letting it complete its task.

kemical · Jul 8, 2016

Well usual causes for no dump file are, incorrect settings, no pagefile or one thats too small and/or hard drive issues. Have you checked the minidump folder just in case dump files are present but just not being picked up. You'll find it in the main Windows folder.

BIGBEARJEDI · Jul 8, 2016

JohnL97231 said:
Hey, unrelated question, can I create a Windows 10 installation media on a normal size DVD? Windows Media Creation Tool says if I create one on a USB flash drive, I'll need at least 3GB.

>>>Hi John: Using the MCT tool from Microsoft website you'll need a minimum of an 8GB usb flash drive. When I first starting making W10 bootable flash drives; they only worked on a 16GB drive since they required just about 9GB of space. Since last year, the MCT tool will be able to create the W10 bootable flash drive on an 8GB drive. However, I still am only able to do it on a 16GB flash drive. An important thing to know. Also, you should be aware in a bug with the SanDisk Cruzer line of flash drives. They will not work with the Microsoft MCT tool and associated ISO file you download from the Microsoft site!! We've verified this problem on both W10 & W8.1. You have to use a non-SanDisk brand of usb drive in order to do this. We have tested so far on Verbatim and PNY with W10. FYI in case you go the USB drive route.<<<
>>>EDIT: Making the DVD disc using the MCT tool is vastly easier than making the USB bootable flash drive as you can see!<<<

Best,
<<<BIGBEARJEDI>>>

kemical · Jul 9, 2016

Any news on the dump file? Did you have a look?

JohnL97231 · Jul 9, 2016

kemical said:
Any news on the dump file? Did you have a look?

No dump file. My system's page file is on (D). Perhaps that is the problem? What should I do? Set a page file for (C)?

Windows 10 Display driver stopped responding and has recovered

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