New Hard Drive, Reinstalling Windows and Drivers - Problems

epopper

I have a Power Spec G350 that is about 5 years old. I only use it for stock trading and Plane.

It recently started acting strangely and wouldn't boot up. Would start into a mode that would ask if I wanted to repair or reinstall windows. No options would work. Took the computer to the mother ship (MC) and they suggested a new hard drive and total reinstallation of everything.

Being the cheap guy that I am, I decided to attempt this myself. I am somewhat capable mechanically and have a basic understanding of the process. My experience though is that something as routine as this usually becomes complex very quickly.

I bought a 1TB Samsung drive and installed it. I reset the BIOS to boot off of the CD/DVD drive and used my Windows 10 disc to start the install. It went fairly well. Windows installed. Had to manually install the wifi internet driver and then updated windows. The problem I ran into was when I started working on the Nvidia graphics card (GTX 1080) drivers. It appears that the card drivers are installed and recognized, but I get an error message when I try to update. Additionally, after I downloaded Xplane 12 and tried to install it, I get an error message that stops the installation "No Vulkan 1.1 capable instance found." I have tried to google and install a driver for this but it leads me to a page on Nvidia with choices that don't make sense. I have tried to navigate these, but the 2 attempts have failed.

Any help would be appreciated. It wouldn't surprise me if I am missing something else too if anyone has any input.

Thanks.

Eric

JS_MC

Hi @epopper

Have you tried performing a clean install of your GPU drivers?

https://community.microcenter.com/kb/articles/133-how-to-clean-install-video-card-drivers-in-windows-10

I'd recommend trying this!

PowerSpec_MikeW

@epopper

Right click on "Start" and select "Device Manager". Is there an error code on the card under Display Adapters?

epopper

https://community.microcenter.com/discussion/comment/45837#Comment_45837

No. It shows the NVIDIA card.

Eric

epopper

Thanks for the responses. I did a clean install of the video drivers. Completely crashed the computer and it wouldn't boot at all. Got a "SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED" message. Was able to system restore to an earlier time and am now back.

It seems that the error means there is a driver that isn't compatible with Windows 10. I wouldn't mind upgrading to Windows 11, but it doesn't show as an option on my update page. My system exceeds the requirements. Any ideas how to trigger the free upgrade?

Giving up for tonight.

PowerSpec_MikeW

@epopper

Editing, saw you tried the DDU clean install before I posted this. You're installing the latest 526.98?