nVidia bricked after clicking "mount"

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This is really weird, but after clicking “mount another image” in WinCDEmu Portable (3.4), my Windows 8.1 laptop crashed (blue screen) which wouldn’t be that bad if my GeForce card hadn’t STOPPED WORKING. Completely. I RMA’d the first laptop, as I thought that the graphics card stopped working while mounting an image with wincdemu was merely a coincidence. But exactly the same thing happened right now for the second time!

My laptop is Asus N56JR with a GeForce 760M. After the bluescreen crash, Windows boots normally except there is a blank screen for a long while and after that the nVidia graphics gets disabled (with error code 43), Windows reverts to the integrated Intel HD graphics. Trying to reenable the nVidia results in black screen with occasional flickering. Reinstalling Windows didn’t help.

I am baffled how a virtual CD emulator could damage a graphics card (or possibly BIOS?), I wouldn’t believe anyone that would claim this, but that’s what’s happened apparently.

So.. what now? Any ideas what might have caused this? How to fix this mess?

[support]

Hi,

Windows 8.1 has several known issues with video drivers. It is unlikely that your issue is related to WinCDEmu. Please try installing Windows 8 instead.

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As I said, reinstalling Windows had absolutely no effect. And I’m not aware of any issues with drivers. I’m using the official Intel and nVidia drivers. To my surprise, I eventually solved the issue by reflashing the motherboard BIOS…. Yeah.

If I haven’t witnessed it twice, I wouldn’t believe that a driver bug could somehow alter the BIOS (or EFI or whatever it is).

So, just for the reference, if anyone encounters this, I downloaded the Asus winflash utility, the latest BIOS, run the utility with /nodate parameter so it would allow me to reflash the BIOS with the same version and after the BIOS flasher finished, Windows booted normally with the nVidia GPU working again! The blue screen error was VIDEO_DXGKRNL_FATAL_ERROR

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Fun fact – Windows 8 can mount ISOs natively

[faariwasi]

Hi. Even though my virus protection is set to a relatively low level I get “the program has been blocked” pop ups. The anti-virus software made the decision to block because of “server issues”. Is WinCDEmu connected to a remote server? Before I reinstalled my OS (Win XP pro) I didn’t have this problem. I have been using the WinCDEmu for years.

[Author]

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