Help

[banyanbraid]

I installed an nVidia 9800 GTX on my friend's HP Pavilion 8300f. I went into the BIOS and changed the setting from PCI to PCI-E as the video card instructions said and downloaded the right driver software for it. It booted up the first time I clicked restart. But I performed a general tune-up removing unecessary services and startup programs and ran CCleaner on his computer. Upon bootup, the all the text was unreadable right from the moment the HP screen showed up. I went into safe mode and renabled all the services in case. When I rebooted again, the desktop wouldn't show up and safe mode only took me to a recovery console. What should i do? Would my HP recovery CDs for Windows 7 64 bit work for his computer that currently runs on Vista? 32 bit?

 

[iPwn]

No they won't, can you do a system restore from safe mode?

 

[mikeyakouba]

Yeah try a system restore from safe mode. that's probably your best bet. It will roll back the driver installations and whatever other program changes you made and hopefully it will fix whatever is wrong.

 

[banyanbraid]

When I get into safe mode, all that shows up is a recovery console. Even though it has an option to do system restore, it tells you that you have no saved points to restore from. I think I forgot to mention something. When I boot up normally, only a black screen shows up with a mouse pointer int he middle of the screen. But I can access task manager from here and open Internet explorer manually with New Task > iexplore.exe . Also, do you think the new video card is the problem?

At this point I see my best option is to downgrade to Windows XP, but how would I create a new partition to install it in if I can't see the desktop?

scratch that...even normal bootup takes me to the recovery console

 

[Indigo]

you can also try tapping F8 and using "last known good configuration" in lieu of a system restore. They don't do the same thing, but sometimes that can fix problems that you can't fix otherwise.