I've been having issues with installing new drivers for my AMD Radeon HD 8850M for at least 1-2 years - windows would freeze during an update / fresh installation. So far I was able to resolve the issues by finding an older version of drivers that would work.
Few days ago my Windows crushed and wouldn't boot properly (stuck on a black screen before login). It took me a while to realize it might be an issue with GPU drivers but eventually I removed them with DDU and was able to start Windows normally. I tried installing few versions of drivers (to be exact: 18.9.2, 18.5.1, v15.201.1101 (A01), v12.105.4.0000 (A00)) but windows always froze during installation and when I tried rebooting I'd run into black screen again. I assumed Windows might be at fault since I did an update on the same day, so I decided to reinstall it. Unfortunately the same kept happening on freshly installed windows.
Yesterday I figured that I'm able to install drivers when windows is running the safe mode if I use device manager and point it to an unpacked driver.I tried that and run into black screen three times... But surprisingly windows booted correctly when I installed v12.105.4.0000 (A00). Now device manager finally saw my graphic card, but it displayed "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)". I decided to run regular installation and add compatible catalyst control center. After rebooting graphic card's status changed to "This device is working properly.", but catalyst control center wouldn't open giving me an error "no AMD driver installed.or driver not working properly". I tried running starcraft 2 to see if video card would actually work, but the game was showing "Microsoft basic render driver" as a display. I tried reinstalling the same driver again on normal mode, but windows froze again and wouldn't reboot properly.
I also tried:
- disabling Windows 10 fast startup
- disabling driver signature enforcement
I'm starting to run out of ideas, please help.
I'm using Windows 10 Pro 64bit on Dell Latitude 3540:
AMD Radeon HD 8850M
Intel Core i5-4200U
1x4 GB RAM DDR 2
