Vista Blue Screen after Successful Boot Camp installation (32 and 64 bit)
OK so there are a number of people with issues relating to the BSoD after a successful (or not) implemetation of Bot Camp and Windows XP and/or Vista. One of the identified problems relates to the NVIDIA GEforce 9600m GT display driver which crashes out AFTER windows performs its update routine.
Having removed and installed the partition (to ensure a clean install each time), the inescapable conclusion is that the NVIDIA driver is to blame for the crash dump, but it is one of the many MS updates that is the root cause of the failure. If you do a clean install of Vista 32 or 64 Ultimate and install the Boot Camp 2.1 (build 1256) and DO NOT allow updates, the system is not only stable, it runs like a train!
I have Contacted AppleCare about this (as my new MBP is only a few days old) and they have not even heard of the problems. NVIDIA have obviously got issues with something as the driver has been updated to a BETA on their web site, but this will not work on a Mac as it cannot seem to find the hardware to allow the update to complete.
If (like me) you have bought an MBP for support issues for both Mac and Windows users, this is a showstopper and one that is about to cause me to ask for my money back. So far, the nice shiny and new MBP is back in its box pending a 140 mile trip back to Exeter from whence it came.
Is there a way do disable the Windows updates? If the unit "runs like a train" without the updates, why download a bad update from Microsoft? I'm not sure Apple has much control over what updates Vista offers.
The short answer is "Yes" you can disable the updates, but this is a potential security risk of non-trivial proportions. Unlike dear old MacOS, Windows is more prone to idiocyncratic behaviour and updates must be applied if you are to have any success with getting support from MS.
I've managed to solve 90% of the puzzle and have traced the CAUSE of the failure, my concern is how deep this goes. That NVIDIA have actually released so-called beta update software would indicate that they know of the trouble but sadly Apple has yet to catch the ball on this one.
Yes, I'm kind of getting to that thought (turning off updates and doing them manually), but it doesn't help my non-techie clients. I'm trying to sell them Macs as an alternative to the normal laptop solutions for high-powered execs and for academia/research. I have a sweet deal that gives me nothing for the hardware, but they will take my software and that is worth a lot to me!
Right, the NVIDIA graphics driver has more flake to it than Cadburys. Anything -and I really mean "anything" that has any interaction with the video driver on the MBP will cause the blue screen. We installed a clean version of Vista 32 and Vist 64 (ultimate) and everything was fine. We then installed the Ultimate add-in for the desktop and wallop - down it all went. The problem is not confined to just the obvious interations either. If you install the critical updates for Windows this also causes the BSoD so you're back to square one.
Given that AppleCare had no idea about this, I am shocked that the users have to find out the hard way. So far this has cost my business over £2,000 to investigate.
Nvidia beta probably means they are working on games. They have said that for once they will offer graphic drivers for any and all mobility users.
People writing drivers often get the short shrift (you don't pay for drivers the way you do for software) and as I said, long overdue for Boot Camp 3.0 (would be nice to see drivers direct from Nvidia for the motherboard etc).
There are some mixed reviews of MacBooks running Vista, some very positive, one in particular was "never again."
Right, after days of playing around with this and using three of my highest techies to verify, we have identified that the problems are down to the NVIDIA drivers that are shipped with the Leopard OSX disk.
Anyone having lock-ups, screen freezes or BSoDs should do the following:
Assuming you have installed XP or Vista (32 or 64) successfully and installed Boot Camp.
Restart the MBP and select the Windows partition.
Hold down the F8 key to allow the system to start in SAFE mode.
Once you get to the main screen, go to: START - CONTROL PANEL and choose SYSTEM
From the menu, choose DEVICE MANAGER
Go to DISPLAY and click on the '+' to open the driver dialogue
Highlight the NVIDIA driver and go to ACTIONS and choose PROPERTIES
You should see that the driver is dated 3/9/2008 and is version 7.15.11.7644
Click "DISABLE DRIVER" in the dialogue box.
Close all windows.
Restart the MBP in the normal way.
Once Windows starts, you will notice that all the Boot Camp drivers are working, but the screen res is v. poor. Do not worry.
Right click on the desktop and choose PROPERTIES.
Go to SETTINGS and set the video resolution to the native Mac resolution and SAVE the setting.
You will now have a stable Windows environment.
--> This has been reported to Apple who have received our findings and we await a response from either NVIDIA and/or Apple. THIS IS NOT A WINDOWS PROBLEM. This is down to shipped drivers on the Leopard OSX Disk that simply do not work.
That, and more (like using Driver Sweeper) are pretty much the 'norm' when installing graphic drivers. There is a tutorial on eVGA and on Guru3D.
Good news is the latest Nvidia Windows 7 graphics drivers seem to do an outstandng job.
In the past users were left with Apple only, now, Nvidia is offering standalone drivers and I would use May's (came out last 3 days).
It may be different, but I've always had to change resolution, stop or let Windows install its drivers and then go through and uninstall and install Nvidia's. And I delete and remove the driver.
Otherwise, outside of such 3rd party PCI Express controllers which ALL need drivers and best to get from the vendor, I don't have trouble with using Windows Update or the system.... probably less even than OS X Leopard patches and updates.
The point is that if you pay nearly £2,000 for a piece of equipment that is sold on the basis that it works 'out of the box' with Windows and it does not, it is simply not good enough. It also took five 'phone calls to get Apple's support personnel to realise that the text-book answer is not an asnwer as such, it is a fob-off as they "... don't support Windows ..."
The Leopard OSX disc is an Apple-supplied software respository that supports Windows, it is this that causes the problems, and as such it is Apple's responsibility to fix it, not us out here in user-land.
The whole reason I am moving my business to the Apple platform is because of years of Microsoft end-user abuse with software that simply has too many bugs to be taken seriously. My business demands secure and useable systems that are solid from day one. The Mac and the Apple solution proves this, but I have to also support the real world, and Windows has to be part of this.
Now, if Apple supplies a bust-up NVIDIA driver for a £1,700 piece of equipment, I am entitled to be somewhat hacked off - especially when I have to fix the thing as well for the money!
I've had a successful boot camp partition of Windows XP going on my MacBook since last August but a couple of weeks ago I started getting unexpected blue screens every couple of days; now it's every time I turn it on. I believe a standard MacBook doesn't have a dedicated GPU (or whatever), but could this problem be related? And could a variant on your MBP solution help with the issues I've been getting on mine?
thanks for the quickfix for all the crashes. I totally agree that it is the drivers supplied by apple. Everything else works fine, but as soon as I engage the nvidia chipset, BOOM BSOD. Since disabling it, I've had no crashes.
I hate that disabling the driver also seems to disable the aero option and sets your system performance to 1. Does disabling the driver affect game playback, or is the system still somehow using the processor?
Has an official complaint been filed with apple? Are they aware of it? I've only had my 15 inch unibody MBP for a week and all the windows crashes were killing me.
Boot Camp was a response to public challenges at the time to see who could find how to install Windows on a Mac - which is totally okay thing.
Then you want Apple to do more than any normal PC vendor selling a laptop where people have to do things like deal with BIOS, drivers and all the things you have had to deal with, for Windows.
I'm not disagreeing, let alone arguing, I agree that hardware abstraction layer type stuff Apple would need to do. But I don't think Apple needs to do more than get Windows installed. Drivers, AV, and all the stuff that comes with Windows doesn't change. But it should not BSOD when you install something you are told you need.
I wouldn't be surprised though to see Windows 7 eventually support Apple hardware out of the box so to speak.
Cookie cutter answers are part of today's customer experience "level one" is no level at all, but a lot of times - and it takes a lot of work - to translate feedback and problems into "cook book" before you get to the troubleshooting (level 2 and above).
Which is why I read sites like MacIntouch; subscribe to MacFixit (tons of articles on a CD along with shareware). And books.
Nvidia has terrible drivers in OS X on the Mac Pro (workstation) while ATI has had very good drivers and OpenGL support.
I prefer to have more choice and freedom when it comes to drivers. As for engineering and how things get qualified (use to see even SCSI hard drives had to be qualified for both the OS; the controller to be used; driver version; firmware; etc).
What I see is the first shipped BIOS/EFI firmware on any device or system is not the one you want.
Back in the 70's I was introduced to "bleeding edge" but we would get premiere on-site support if we were willing to install, adopt, some new IBM service, software/hardware. And sometimes we were there on Sunday on holiday weekends.
One person just could NOT after doing everything under the sun, get Adobe CS4 to install on their new $5000 Mac Pro 2009. Got a new system, worked perfectly.
In 2008 Early Mac Pro, most all systems would freeze on wake from sleep. Took two months before an EFI update was issued that cured the problem. There is/was also a problem with "inrush current" and PSU.
I had Blue Screen with Vista. Repeatedly.
At first I thought it was a new MICROSOFT 4000 keyboard.
Later I wondered if it was my Apple OEM Nvida 7300GT (and some are failing but it worked in OS X) so I bought 2nd, a PC 8600GTS.
And pull 3rd party PCI Express controllers (FW800, SATA 1x, SATA 8x cards).
Came away and thought "oh, it was the 3rd party card" when that seemed to work.
Around the same time I had bought a new WD Caviar 750GB SATA drive.
It was that drive that would cause problems with Vista after the install.
I thought it was something in Microsoft Windows Update that was causing my personal ****, not my equipment. And MS for their drivers. Somebody else's.
And mind you, I would go through install half a dozen times, try installing Boot Camp before updates, after updates, not at all, add AV software.
I finally -- after a full year -- learned a lot (don't learn from things just working and I still say it has always been "Plug and Pray" PnP ) things work. I know the frustration and aggravation and the wish that things were different somehow.
The BSODs that I got were not from Apple Boot Camp. I even ran my system w/o Boot Camp for six months. And this time, with Win7, everything worked fine, wake, sleep, networking, no need for Apple drivers. At all.
I hang out on a forum where people build their own, X58 board, Intel Core i7, eVGA graphics. And how to get even DDR3 to work, and then how to get the most out of and push it to the extreme, then throttle back a notch.
The nice thing about that is you learn from it, like you do from racing and sports, to build a better mousetrap.
Nvidia is bleeding. Even as they and ATI want to stay on leading edge. Intel is contracting (even as they have their best cpu technology ever coming out) and costs that should go into R&D may be harder to "justify" or all the prototype programmers engineers and testing labs. Everything is more commoditized than ever.
Bottom line: I have Leopard 10.5.6. It has Boot Camp 2.1.2 version, later than the 2.1 download. And there has not been a single update posted online. But my original Leopard DVD 10.5.0 has the SAME contents packaged as 2.0 as were in the 1.4 Beta. I spend $129 for a new DVD to get the latest drivers. Make sense?? of course not.
Oh, and my Mac with 64-bit hardware, cpu, the EFI BIOS is 32-bit so no official support from Apple to install BC 2.1.2 or use Vista 64-bit. Snow Leopard will be 64-bit kernel, require and enforce 64-bit drivers. Should be interesting. Because technically, and logic, would say I don't have a true 64-bit BIOS environment.
Got an iMac? not supported with 64-bit. MacBook 2008 had 64-bit support, but not the "Late 2008" there you need MacBook Pro. And yet everyone wants to address more than 2GB (Apple EFI32 allows access to 3.3GB on some, 1.9GB on others, and in my Mac Pro? limited to 1.9GB memory in Windows.... so you know I don't want to run a Xeon workstation in Windows 32-bit.
what i experienced was a clean install of vista worked fine, but after installing the full bootcamp driver installation it bluescreened every time from that on.
decided to try again with a clean install, maybe it was just a glitch 🙂, same ****.
i know everyone here says it's the gforce drivers, but my guts told me it wasn't, so i decided to install the single drivers one by one, NVidiaSetup.exe (gfx), NVidiaChipset.exe (ethernet ect.) and last i did the bootcamp.msi in the apple dir. still no bluescreen!, ofcourse with reboots every time to see if something happened..
so now i have a working vista WITH gforce drivers and all, only things i still have marked not working in device manager is: isatap and teredo tunneling Pseudo-Interface, both which are network related, so i can't see what driver that should come from since i already installed nvidia chipset. 😟
-Deco
from the beginning i had a bad feeling about the realtek drivers, not sure if im right.
I am yet another person experiencing difficulty with the NVIDIA drivers on Boot Camped Vista. I have come across a few issues that may or may not be of any use - but on the off chance anyone is going down the same pathway ...
Having installed Vista and being Blue Screened to death, I contacted the Microsoft Help Desk (apparently located in a "Bombay" bazar) to ask for assistance only to be told that they _do not_ offer technical support for Vista on Boot Camp! I was advised they do support Parallels and VMWare Fusion. So the following day I purchased Parallels. This worked wonderfully for everything except the games I bought it for (Parallels has a 90 day returns policy, so I am not crying yet). I also found that running Vista through Parallels the MBP was considerably cooler.
I am going to try your work-around, thanks for your advise.
I have this same issue with my new Macbook Pro and Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit. Very frustrating as this is my second new Macbook Pro in two weeks, the first had a faulty screen and was replaced. Two points that may help;
1. Follow the good advice of Shark first and boot into Vista (the nvidia driver will be disabled)then re-run the boot camp drivers install. Only one more blue screen for me in the last two days so a big improvement but still not a permanent fix.
2. I have had two new Macbook Pros and followed EXACTLY the same install procedure on both - one had this problem and the other did not so there may be a production/harware issue in the mix.
Has anybody got an update on this issue or found a permanent fix? If not I have one week left in which to return this Macbook which is something I really do not want to do.
