Friday, May 18, 2018

In Windows 8.1, how do I check logs for device driver installation failures?



Some background: In Windows 8.1, I am trying to update my display drivers for my two crossfired Radeon HD 7950 cards. The latest Catalyst 13.9 (stable) install seems to fail so I've tried updating the drivers manually with Device Manager. I try to upgrade from the place I've unpacked the display driver packages from the 13.9 installer, but every time I try to install the drivers manually, I get the following error:




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I am trying really hard to locate the path specified that it can't find...but I haven't had any luck. In Event Viewer -> Windows Logs -> Application I don't see any logged errors! What is the issue?! Its driving me crazy.



Edit: Success. The solution was all in the logs at C:\Windows\Inf\setupapi.dev.log...it had said it found the driver already inside a folder at 'C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\' when in fact that folder was not present so I manually created and copied the drivers to it, and it worked.


Answer



Success. The solution was all in the logs at C:\Windows\Inf\setupapi.dev.log (which are extremely useful logs that are part of the device driver SetupAPI)...it had said it found the driver already inside a folder at 'C:\WINDOWS\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\' when in fact that folder was not present so I manually created and copied the drivers to it, and it worked. Also, it seems it was missing a DLL which I was able to add to the C:\WINDOWS\System32 directory that I had found in a sub-directory from that path (yeah, a pretty strange thing but whatever, it is what it is). Then, when I rebooted, there were errors in Device Manager about the drivers not being certified since I installed them manually. So, all I had to do then was use the same Catalyst installer to install my drivers again even though Catalyst was already installed on my system (don't worry, Catalyst handles this for you and only installs one instance of everything) (also, I installed the same version of the drivers again, over the ones that weren't certified - Catalyst's installed picked up that its drivers were not fully installed - probably checks certification or something else). Anyways, it seems the install succeeded and I see the current Catalyst drivers up on my computer and up to date, so everything worked smooth like butter. AND, everything seems to work properly...the only other thing I had to do to make my games not crap out on me was to make sure that AMD overdrive settings were set to defaults. For some reason I had upped them to maximum's and this crapped my cards out. THAT is another involved process, since I'm using beta drivers. You have to check off the use overdrive checkox, then hit the defaults button, save, uncheck overdrive checkbox. Save again. Close Catalyst, reopen, go back and make sure the overdrive settings are correct on all your crossfired cards. Repeat until it finally proceeds to set the values correctly. So ridiculous...I know...


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