BSOD After HDD Upgrade and Vista Reinstall (only occurs after restarts)

[NightSurge]

So here is the basics:

My friend has an older Dell Inspiron 1520 (by older, I mean a year or so). He was complaining about it being slow, so I took a look at it and the only real upgrade I could do was a larger/faster hard drive and a fresh install.

So I bought a 160GB 7200rpm drive to replace his 80GB 5400rpm drive. I installed it and the Vista Reinstall went off without a hitch. Then I reinstalled the drivers. Also, I should mention I used his Dell Reinstall and Driver discs, not a Vista DVD.

Everything was running fast and fine until we installed the first set of Windows Updates. Everything but SP1 basically. There were two Optional updates that I went ahead and installed (one was for his video card and one for just a generic vista update). As soon as he restarted after those updates a BSOD shows up during the Vista loading bar.

It did not specify a specific error like most BSODs but merely said "check your latest driver installations or recently installed hard drives." I can't remember all it said exactly, but I eventually started up in "debugger mode" and it started up fine. Then anytime I shutdown it works fine. But if you use Restart, the error comes back.

Was there something wrong with the Vista updates? Possibly one of those optional ones?

Or could it be that the hard drive is not cooperating since it is not the original drive that came with the Dell? Since it only happens on Restarts, it seems kind of unrelated to either of those, but I don't know. That's why I'm asking all of you here to see if you have any knowledge on the topic.

Thanks!

 

[KSoD]

Hello,

It sounds to me that the Video driver is at fault. Find a more up to date driver for the video. the ones from Windows Update can be outdated and buggy.

Cheers,
Mak

 

[NightSurge]

I'll have him give that a try. It just seems odd that when shutdown and started up it works fine, but if you use the restart option it does this.

 

[KSoD]

Surge,

That does seem odd. It could be that when using the Restart option that the PC is not shutting down correctly. By that i mean not saving the profile correctly or something like that to cause this to happen when he restarts and not when he shuts down.

I would suggest a install of SP1 to see if that helps resolve the issue.

Cheers,
Mak

 

[NightSurge]

Newest driver for video did not solve the issue. I told him to try SP1 and I think he is waiting to download it from WU, but if that doesn't work, I think it's just left for another reinstall.

 

[NightSurge]

Ok, this is very odd, but after reinstalling windows, the error happened again as soon as we applied the first tier or WU's. I made sure to not get the old driver or anything.

So I went back and did a system restore to just before we applied the updates, then went and downloaded SP1 directly and applied that. Everything is working great now, so apparently some update in the first 56 updates was failing and causing his system to act very odd.

 

[KSoD]

Not really. It depends. Some of the old updates were know to cause issues on certain systems. It was hit or miss on which one it was and the system.

To bad we couldnt narrow it down to which one though.

Cheers,
Mak

 

[EricB]

I don't know about vista, but lately xp have been adding some horrible drivers for the video cards. I encounter a few bsod's going to windows update and downloading a new video driver on a computer that I've fixed. I don't update video through windows updates anymore.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

I have had the same issue on my laptop with one of the updates, never could figure out which one it was though.