Two problems occuring with Windows 7 on my new PC

[Lethn]

Hey guys! I got my computer built and installed windows 7 fine finally hurray! Even browsing is ridiculously fast but now I have run in to two very annoying problems though and it's happening because I've got a new motherboard and BIOS I'm not familiar with so I figured I should log onto here and ask people with more experience about it.

The first major one is that I've installed my ATI graphics drivers of course directly from the manufacturers website and while I got pop ups claiming it was all installed I get an error whenever I restart claiming that the ATI graphics driver hasn't installed of course, that isn't true, because the installation completed without any problems and windows configured itself as I restarted.

Heres the full error message "No AMD graphics driver is installed, or the AMD driver is not functioning properly. Please install the AMD driver appropriate for your AMD hardware."

Things I've already tried:

. Made sure that I downloaded drivers from MSI's website and not ATI

. Scan for updates/install from disk

. scanned for hardware changes

. installed older drivers that are more stable ( Version 13.2 )

. removed all drivers and do a clean re-install ( I even just formatted windows 7 just to make sure so I'm on a clean OS now )

. Tried disabling driver signature enforcement which a lot of people were saying was the problem, no luck

Now I searched around and there were lots of mentions of doing scan for update but locating a support folder where version 13.4 is installed by default, but there's no such one anywhere that I can find so I think that maybe that's not to do with my particular problem but that's why I'm here, there is a warning symbol in device manager on my display adaptor category and it says "ATI Radeon HD 6900 series"

Now for my second problem, hard drives, I had no problems detecting hard drives before but while my main OS installed hard drive has come on fine the backup hard drive I have which has all my important stuff there isn't being detected on my computer. The funny thing is, I had this problem before and either I forgot how to do it or again, this is a new motherboard and I'll need to do something different. The hard drives all show up cleanly in the BIOS, they show up in the boot menu before Windows 7 starts up and they all show up in device manager and elsewhere, so I'm a bit stuck on this one but maybe you guys will know how to fix it.

I'm begging you don't tell me to format it I definitely need what's on that hard drive and it was strictly used for storage so no OS' were installed on it. It's weird but I think the internet has actually gotten worse for asking technical problems which is why I came here, there were too many very stupid comments from people for me to sift through. For the record my graphics card and hard drives were connected up fine before and there are no plugs missing or anything like that so I can fairly confidently rule out a problem with the way I've installed things.

Let me know if you have any ideas! These should be fairly simple to fix as I'm fairly certain they're software problems because I double checked and quadruple checked compatability for everything, so It's probably just some setting or trick I don't know about that I need help with.


Here's the motherboard and graphics card:

Motherboard: Asrock 960GC-GS FX

Graphics Card: ATI Radeon 6970 MSI Lightning

Windows Platform: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit

Hope the information helps! I'll continue searching on my own so if I suddenly manage to fix everything I'll lock this thread and leave an explanation for anyone else having a similar issue.

[Lethn]

..... Just solved my hard drive problem

Right click computer

Manage

double click on storage

click on disk management

I found that there was an unnamed drive which matched the hard drive space of my backup hard disk, I right clicked it then clicked "change drive letters and path" that fixed the problem, I now have access to all my stuff.

Just need to fix the graphics driver issue now!

[Lethn]

Well for some reason I manage to fix it but it has me slightly worried, the drivers I downloaded were from the manufacturers website but didn't work, so I did a clean uninstall of them and installed some option radeon drivers from windows update itself, all of a sudden it's working now but the drivers that were listed are from the HD 3000 series, I guess I just better do some testing and playing around to see if this has just installed something basic on my computer.

[Foxpup]

As I recall, installing AMD drivers on Windows requires that you go into Device Manager and select your video card and go into Properties->Driver and perform some ritual that I forget the details of, but I think it involves candles and goat blood. That's part of the reason I don't use Windows any more.

[Lethn]

As I recall, installing AMD drivers on Windows requires that you go into Device Manager and select your video card and go into Properties->Driver and perform some ritual that I forget the details of, but I think it involves candles and goat blood. That's part of the reason I don't use Windows any more.

LOL! But seriously, I did get it fixed and now I'm worried about windows shoving outdated drivers onto my system :S Guess I'll have to play some games to see if everything works, the problem is developers like EA have some really obnoxious DRM that checks your graphics drivers and so on so that's what I'm worried about.

[Decksperiment]

As I recall, installing AMD drivers on Windows requires that you go into Device Manager and select your video card and go into Properties->Driver and perform some ritual that I forget the details of, but I think it involves candles and goat blood. That's part of the reason I don't use Windows any more.

LOL! But seriously, I did get it fixed and now I'm worried about windows shoving outdated drivers onto my system :S Guess I'll have to play some games to see if everything works, the problem is developers like EA have some really obnoxious DRM that checks your graphics drivers and so on so that's what I'm worried about.

Just go to some gaming site, type in your grafix card model, and voila, someone will show you decent drivers.. msi are crap.. oh, and make sure you select proper graphics card type in bios, you could be using onboard graphics.. though this dont explain why there is no ati installation folder containing the setup files..

[Lethn]

Seriously? When the fuck did it become so difficult to install a driver? I even got auto-detect working and had the latest 14.9 drivers installed, it shouldn't be this difficult, I'm seriously considering trading my damn ATI graphics card in for an Nvidia one now but I guess that's their plan. After a LOT of digging it appears to be a very specific and nasty piece of DRM designed by Microsoft to attack manufacturers and developers who don't sign up to their digital signature program, I didn't know about this piece of shit at all but apparently in order to get on this special list people have to pay a chunk of money or have their software treated as if it's some untrustworthy program.

I found this program http://www.ngohq.com/?page=dseo called Driver Signature Enforcement Override and I'm going to figure out how it all works and experiment, will let you guys know if anything comes of it because I think it's the most realistic option to fixing this unless you lot come up with anything else.

Edit: I'll double check the intergrated graphics in the BIOS, will see if the works Decksperiment

[Lethn]

I think it was probably me changing the chipset options in the BIOS that did it, so thanks I guess Decksperiment?

What happened was I went to the BIOS and in the graphics options there was only PCI or PCI-E and since I had already tried PCI several million times it looks like that's what did it, I should point out though I also installed 13.9 ATI drivers since anything higher was causing some fucking weird problems on my PC, thanks for your suggestions and comments guys.

Edit: Now I remember it I did actually do this the last time but it was so long ago since my last format that I couldn't even remember *facepalm*

[Decksperiment]

Glad to have helped.. see, when you install some drivers, they appear to install when in fact all they do is extract the installation files, but obviously if the correct type of card is not chosen in bios, then the drivers wont be detected properly, so they wont be installed, but should auto install when you choose correct socket, ie, pci or pci-e, but then you found that out.. Screw drm, yup, screw anything after xp tbh..

[TheIrishman]

Screw drm, yup, screw anything after xp tbh..

Hear, hear!

[Lethn]

Never thought I'd agree with Decksperiment on something, it seems the internet is thoroughly united against DRM lol I did have a hell of an easy time with Windows XP despite how annoying it sometimes is to install just because there was a lot less junk on it.