PC Screen goes black while Gaming, then weirdness

The Dude With Herpes

Well, what is quickly becoming a monthly thing, I'm having serious PC issues.

What happens is I'll be playing a game (WoW, haven't been putting much time into anything else lately) and for no apparent reason the screen will just go black for a second and then come back.

When this happens I know that if I quit out of WoW, I'll just get a black screen and my PC will be totally locked. If I alt-tab same dealio.

While this is incredibly frustrating in its own right, every once in awhile, usually every half dozen times or so, this occurs and I have to reboot, when I load Windows (7 x64) it'll act like my drivers for my video card aren't installed at all. I'll reload them and it'll go back to "normal".

I have no idea what could be causing this as "screen goes black when gaming" gives ninety trillion returns on google. I have dual 460 GTX's, but they're not overheating at all so that's not the problem. As usual I haven't seen the issue in any game except WoW, but that's because it's all I've been playing lately really. Though I have been playing a good amount of Borderlands the last day or two and haven't seen anything like this.

The only thing I know for sure is wrong on my PC is that my HDD is on the verge of going out. At least I'm fairly sure that's the case. There's a small chance it could be my MOBO but I'm thinking it isn't.

Is there something about a hard drive having read issues that could lead to something like this? It seems really weird if so; but what is leading my thinking away from it being a video issue is the weird lack of any PC usage after the "black" thing. Like, the inability to alt-tab and/or quit WoW without getting a fully locked PC. That really doesn't seem like something a video card would do. I've tried multiple drivers for my video cards, same issues for whichever one I try, old, current or beta.

Hopefully I'll get enough gift money/cards via Christmas that I can afford to get a new HDD and this issue will magically go away; but in case that doesn't occur, has anyone ever seen an issue like this? Any help would be appreciated.

EDIT: To clarify, after it goes back, usually it just goes back into WoW and I can play normally. It will sometimes do it several times a night. However if it does it even once, I get the lockup if I quit/alt-tab. Sometimes, however, when it goes black, it won't come back at all and just stays locked up just like it does when I try to quit/alt-tab after it happens once.

jungleroomx

Have you uninstalled all the old video card drivers? Is DirectX up to date? Is your mobo BIOS up to date?

Edit: I also read about a guy having similar issues to yours that fixed it by updating Java. Seems like a long shot, but hey...

The Dude With Herpes

Yeah to all of that...though...I don't think I even have java installed. At least I have no recollection of ever installing it since I had to reinstall my whole PC a month or two ago.

EDIT: Yep, just checked, no Java on this system.

jungleroomx

Aside from nuking the system from orbit to ensure it's not a software problem, I'd wager it's probably the motherboard.

Are your WOW and desktop resolutions the same?

The Dude With Herpes

Yep.

I have considered the mobo thing but I was having actual problems with the hard drive shortly after a reinstall due to new mobo/cpu somewhat recently, requiring repairing sectors and such. I hadn't been having hard drive problems prior to this, so I suppose that could be related to the mobo...I just didn't want to RMA the mobo to find out because I'd be out of a PC for weeks.

I guess I'm still in that situation; I don't want to be without PC for a long time and despite still having my old mobo/cpu, my win7 install isn't compatable and I'm not about to reinstall my PC again for a week or two for an RMA. At the same time I could just replace the mobo outright since the price of HDD's right now are absurd, but then it's a sunk cost for my old mobo. Though, I suppose I could RMA it and see if it gets fixed, order another one to have so I'm not out of my PC, and then just sell the "new" one as used on ebay and take the hit in money.

Ugh. I'd rather it be the hard drive really. I already knew I had problems with it and was planning on replacing it already, maybe at the very least getting an SSD and a smaller normal drive. Replacing the HDD is straight forward and wouldn't require any reinstall or anything. Well, it would if I got an SSD I supposed.

Ugh. I wish I had the money to just do a complete PC replacement when I had to replace the motherboard and stuff. I hate having to stick with half old parts and half new parts.

EDIT: Plus every test I have for my motherboard shows it as clean and no problems. all the diagnostics, ram, cpu tests show clean and they have. the only part on my PC that has shown errors since my upgrades is the hard drive. I've just been telling myself that something is causing the hdd to fail loading things while I'm playing and it's just giving up and leading to the weird black screen lockups. I already get weirdness while playing more and more like all the sudden my viewable distance just going super low then back up again inexplicably, or sky textures and such failing to load for several minutes after zoning into an area with a different skybox.

I'm going to play something different today and see if I get anything similar with a different game like Skyrim or something.

Quantux

What makes you think the drive is going out? Anything interesting in the app/system logs?

The Dude With Herpes

A week or so after I upgrade my mobo/cpu my system started booting really slowly. Like, 10 minutes from button press till everything was loaded.

This is on a pretty clean install.

Programs loading started taking an inordinate amount of time.

I dl'd and ran the seagate tools for my drive and the first time I got an error that would have warranted an RMA (it is still under warranty) but they wanted me to run the "dos" version of the tools to see if it could repair errors. It did and repaired several. After this things were better but still considerably slower than previously. Like, simply loading an area in WoW takes about 2x as long as it used to. General disk dickery is pretty slow compared to what it should be. There's a significant delay in things loading in various games, and nothing is wrong with my RAM which leads me to conclude there is a lot of delay in loading things from the HDD to memory. Like, in WoW if I load into Hyjal I can make it halfway to the Sanctuary of Malorne (this means nothing if you don't play WoW) before the skybox for Hyjal actually loads.

While these things could be controller related on the mobo, my motherboard has 3 different controllers and I've tried each and it's the exact same issue on each, which points me back to the HDD.

I've done all the defragging/disk cleanups etc. No improvement.

Running through the logs shows nothing useful. There's plenty of kernel errors related to the system not shutting down properly but they don't give me any information I can use to help. Due to the way the system is locking up I'm not really surprised. It really seems like the OS is just straight up gone and there's nothing to quit/alt-tab to when this happens. The system just sits there in limbo till I reboot.

Quantux

Yeah, sounds like a drive problem. It's a crapshoot whether or not windows will record the "error during a paging operation" or "error on controller/disk". May want to try a different sata cable just to be sure. And as always, check temps on cpu/gpu and be sure all fans are spinning.

The Dude With Herpes

Ok.

New HDD should be here Thursday. Went for a "cheap" 1gb samsung spinpoint I saw recommended in the build thread awhile back. $150 for 1tb ugh.

Aaaanyway, can anyone recommend me a good cloning program that I can use to just clone my current drive to the new one? I really don't want to put up with a full reinstall when I did one so recently.

Free would be ideal.

Foomy

if your running win7, just use the backup and restore program in the control panel, make a system image, than boot using your win7 disk and go to recovery console, than restore from that image. works very well, and no need to go hunt down something else.

The Dude With Herpes

I can do that for the entirety of everything? The whole drive, registry, games, steam etc? And it'll let me do it on a fresh HDD?

Will it have to create an image on that drive and then i'll have to do a full install from the image? seems like just finding a clone program would be a bit easier and less prone to dicking it up but maybe not? I'm not sure what Win7 does as far as checking hardware, if it'll even notice it's on a different drive if I clone it.

Foomy

it will create an image of your complete drive, everything on it, it does the same thing as a clone program. it's completely idiot proof.
and win7 won't care that the drive is changed.

I used the win7 system image a few months ago to clone my old drive onto a new ssd, it's just super easy.

The Dude With Herpes

cool beans thanks. I'll give it a go when the new drive gets here.

The Dude With Herpes

Alright, I've got the drive and am currently doing the backup thing.

However I'm forseeing a problem.

When I created a partition on the drive so windows could see it I had to assign a drive letter (D) to it in order to do so.

When the image is done being created, if I reboot my pc with the old drive removed, will windows still see the drive as D, or will it automatically read it as C, or can I change it to read as C without any issues? Because if it's reading as D most of my programs aren't going to work.

The Dude With Herpes

Welp, backup done. Here goes.

EDIT: Wait, no, it just put an image on there. I thought it'd just be a flat backup. How do I make it a bootable drive?

EDIT2: Oh, recovery console. my disc is in my daughters room and she's down for the night. I'm gonna try one of these free clone programs.

The Dude With Herpes

Well.

Shit.

I'll have to use my PC more to see if there are any of the same weird crashes I was getting but I can't see any discernable difference in performance and loading speed with the new drive.

Which makes me worry that my mobo is what is dorked and that my HDD, while having problems, wasn't the problem.

Bah. That was a fucking expensive test to run. Who knows, maybe that other stuff will stop and the slow hdd stuff is just in my head.

Or something.

One odd thing is that the "new" drive ended up being 30gb larger than the old one when I did a direct clone. I'm not sure if windows was just reading the old one wrong or if there's 30gb of space just mysteriously taken by nothing. Cleanup shows nothing and the drive is 0% fragmented. It should have been a straight 1:1 copy. EDIT: I mean, 30gb more space was taken.

Ego

Likely there's a hidden restore partition on your original HD, it's fairly common.

So, are the issues in games resolved?

The Dude With Herpes

Not sure yet. I'll have to actually sit down and play an extended session of something to see, as it finished last night really late.

However, after the initial loads everything was considerably speedier with the new drive after I made that post last night. It seems like it is properly caching information like the system is supposed to now instead of what my old drive was doing which was apparently having to fully load everything every time it needed it, always. Which made everything take fucking forever. But, for instance, in WoW, instead of every time I logged out of one character and into another taking a minute or two, after the first character loaded everything, switches took just a few seconds.

So, I'm currently feeling like things are "fixed", but yeah, I'd have to play something awhile straight to see if I get anymore of the crashes.