PC Drivers & Software

[SpookyNoodle]

Hi! I'm having this confusing issue where, when I first turn on my computer for the day, my graphics drivers will be completely uninstalled, and I have to reinstall them, sometimes multiple times, before I can get into a boot of windows that has the drivers actually working. 

For reference, my system is a dual boot of Linux Mint/Windows 10, and this problem only occurs when I try to boot into Win10. I haven't found any correlation between incidents, as sometimes I'll boot into Windows and my drivers will be working perfectly, and other times I will have to 'repair' my drivers and reboot 3 or 4 times before they actually 'stick,' in the sense that the drivers are present when I log in to my user account. 

I tried to save 'msinfo' and 'DxDiag' files of both situations, when the drivers are broken and when they're working, but when I opened them up and tried to compare the differences, the only things that were different were the times of when I saved the reports. 

Are there any other diagnostic or logging tests that I can do, to try and identify why my driver installation sometimes works, and is sometimes corrupted? 

[goodplay]

Have you disabled 'Fast Startup' in windows power plan.

Is windows update over riding/replacing the graphics driver (check version in device manager) ?

[caleb_cruze]

Windows 10 is known for automatically removing incompatible drivers during its install/updates. This could be one of those cases. Did your system come with Windows 10? If not did you check to ensure it was compatible with Windows 10 before doing the upgrade? (including devices).

That aside. The first thing I would do is run DDU tool, removed ALL drivers, and only install the most recent driver. If there is a driver conflict. This should fix it.

Regards,
Caleb

[SpookyNoodle]

I originally ran Windows 10 on this system for 6 years with no problems (none like this anyway), so compatibility shouldn't be an issue. I'll try running DDU, see if that helps. I'm pretty confident that I disabled Fast Boot when I was first setting up Dual Boot, but I'll double check on those settings as well. 

On further reflection, I think that maybe something in the debloat scripts I ran to try and speed up the Windows half of my system may have removed something that Windows didn't like, so it's constantly trying to "repair" itself, and that could be screwing with the drivers. I'll see if I can reset that install, see if that solves the driver issue. 

[SpookyNoodle]

Okay, before I tried resetting my Windows install or anything like that, I tried DDU tool first. After I booted into Compatibility Mode, ran DDU, and then rebooted...my system was running just fine. I was getting 144 Hz, which was one way I was able to determine whether or not I had working drivers. However, I didn't have the little 'AMD' icon in my system tray, and I didn't explicitly install the drivers using an installer that I had downloaded. 

I don't particularly care about being able to record game footage through AMD software or anything like that, but the drivers have seemingly worked through multiple reboots, so I'll take it! Thanks all!

[SpookyNoodle · Accepted solution]

UPDATE: So, for reasons I still don't understand, the drivers started wigging out again. I backed up the files I cared about, then I reset Windows, and after installing the updates there and updating drivers, everything has been working fine consistently for about a week. 

Based on this, I take it that some of the debloat scripts that I ran removed some key service that was provoking an excessive auto-immune response from Windows. I did run some debloat scripts this time around as well, but only to uninstall programs like Candy Crush, I didn't mess with Windows Update or Cortana.