Jul 22, 2008
BSOD with Asus P5N-D Motherboard
Here’s another esoteric tech tip that may help a soul or two who are currently ripping their hair out and cursing Asus with a fury.
If you have Asus’s P5N-D Motherboard, which is based on NVIDIA’s 750i chipset, and are getting a Blue Screen of Death referencing an NVGT.sys error on Windows XP, dispair not! There is hope!
The problem is a crappy driver for the SATA drive controller, and as of yet, Asus (in their Heart Touching wisdom) has not fixed the problem. The cure is simple though.
Surf on over to NVIDIA.com and select Download Drivers. Under Option 1 select:
Product Type: nForce
Product Series: 7 Series
Product: nForce 790i (yes, the 790, NOT the 750)
and, the rest of the stuff that fits your needs.
For quick reference, the English XP version of the above download is here.
The long and the short of it is that you need to install the “Media Shield” portion of the 790i drivers on top of your 750 board. DO NOT INSTALL EVERYTHING! Just the Media Shield portion.
After doing that with my own P5N-D, I haven’t experienced a single BSOD.
Maybe Asus will fix this eventually, but I wasn’t going to suffer through the headache while they take their sweet time. With the advent of the 790 chipset, I don’t expect them to be rushing to fix things on the older/cheaper set.
You can read more about this topic on the NVIDIA forums here.
Good luck!
IMPORTANT UPDATE!
Melle dropped a note to say that NVIDIA has released new WHQL drivers for nForce that are compatible with the 750i. Early reports say that this driver fixes the BSOD problem with the P5N-D.
Check out the dirvers here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_winxp_15.23.html
I haven’t installed these on my system yet so I can’t vouch for them personally, but given NVIDIA’s common architecture I would expect them to work anyway. This is great news! Thanks Melle!
IMPORTANT UPDATE #2
The latest 750i drivers from NVIDIA take care of this problem entirely! No need for the 790 chipset drivers. Just update your drivers from the NVIDIA website, and you’ll be all set. The latest drivers as of this update are still the 15.23 drivers available here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_winxp_15.23.html
Been reading with avid interest about this board on your blog. Wonderful info. I have the same board with an Intel E8400 Core2, SATA hard drive and a GeForce 9400GT video. Unfortunately, I ran short of funds at this point and had to economize on RAM and used an old CD Writer for my drive. PSU is generic rated at 430. My temps are OK- running mid 50’s during load. At first (I’ve only had this setup 1 month), I was experiencing the BSOD like all others, but updating nForce drivers took care of that. BIOS is 0801. The problem is periodic freezes-mostly during games but sometimes not, and during Winamp visualization especially. I have access to an Audigy card. Would using it instead of the on board help do you think? Any ideas or possibilities would be appreciated.
Hey! Thanks for stopping by and dropping a note…
Games and Visualization are going to be using the graphics card – have you checked the fan on the graphics card? A bad or slow fan there could cause the card to overheat. Temps aren’t really that bad – but also try taking the case off and seeing if the freeze up still happens. As a second option, try swapping out the graphics card if you have an older card laying around, again just to see if the freezing stops.
The sound could be the issue, but I wouldn’t think that it was likely as the graphics – especially if it is only during WinAmp visualization and does not happen during normal playback. You could certainly try the Audigy card if the “access” to it isn’t that troublesome. It is probably better than the onboard anyway, though it may be a tossup.
For giggles, you could try the memtest+ utility (www.memtest.org) and just make sure that your memory is OK.
From what you’ve told me, my gut is that it is graphics related, and possibly due to heat at that time… Let me know what happens! Good luck!
Cheers,
A
TYTYTYTYTYTYTYTYTYTYTY so much, you have no idea how much pain i’ve suffered in the hands of Asus, i only bought this god forsaken mother board because it had a high recommendation rate. Now i know never to trust what other people say, even if it’s a mass of them. You are now officially higher ranked than my appreciation for sugar.
Hi Oscar! So glad to be of service! Glad that your rig is back up and running… And, thanks very much for the kind words!! hehe As a fellow sweet-tooth aficionado, I greatly appreciate the sentiment!!
Best of luck,
A
I think Asus should hire you for troubleshooting, their troubleshooting links are quite frankly crap..
I have had a few bsods dealing with infinite loops and nvdisplay.dll crash outs. I’m running p5n-d with e8500 and geforce 9800gt, I am sure that temps are okay as I have a Antec 900 case with plenty of fans. Have update the bios to 0801. CPU cooler is well seated but it is the standard cooler.
Have recently downloaded the New Nvidia Mobo drivers and am hoping these will help solve the fustrating problem.
Just reading all this info posted here has been the most helpfull info on the whole internet
thanks
Wow! Thanks for the kind words Dirk! I hope that it fixes your problem… I know it can be extremely frustrating! I’m in the middle of a reinstall of the OS due to a drive-by malware attack. YUCK. Trying Vista this time, we’ll see how it goes. Best of luck! Let me know if it works for you…
Cheers,
A
Hi all, well I foolishly bought this motherboard on the high ratings of one website and didnt think to look around a bit harder.
Anyhow, these days since throwing out my old IDE drives years ago in favour of SATA I refuse to buy an IDE drive again just to get my mobo to work. As things currently stand I’ve tried flashing the BIOS to the new 8.01 version, tried the nvidia update, tried the nvidia 790 SATA drivers (as well as going back the Windows standard ones) and a couple of other bits still to no avail.
Just to make my life a bit harder I’m trying to run Vista Ultimate x64. Now currently the only way I’m getting anything to work is during booting pressing F8 to get the load options and selecting “Disable driver enforcement” (or similar to my memory)
Basically this option takes out Windows only allowing itself to use Microsoft signed drivers and nothing that it thinks might be dangerous. Whilst this is a pain to press F8 everytime, there are ways around it:
http://thebackroomtech.com/2007/11/05/howto-disabling-driver-signing-in-windows-vista-64-bit/
Unfortunately all my fiddling has caused something to go terribly wrong at the moment requiring a clearing of the CMOS and a fresh install of Windows. I’ll let you know when thats done. Fingers crossed for a success.
Hi Morgan,
Hmm… I’m assuming that you’ve updated to the latest drivers for the 750, given that the latest ones don’t have the problem that the originals did?
I’m actually now running Vista x64 myself as well, and have no problems at all with my either my SATA optical or hard drives. I don’t need to press F8 during boot at all.
The only problem I had (and this doesn’t have anything to do with the MB at all) was that Vista doesn’t like to have multiple drives in the box on install – or, said another way – the drive you want to install to better be Drive 0 in the BIOS.
Anyway, I’m really sorry for your challenges – I don’t know what the issue could be, as mine is working just fine with seemingly the same config. ??
Let us know what happens after your install!
I had a similar problem with 2 sata hdd not working. 1 sata hdd and 1 sata dvd worked fine. i replaced cables rather than using the supplied cables is the mobo box. what ive found is that the cables with a 90 degree bend on them are for the sata dvd only and the straight ones are for the sata hdd only. since then, all my drives are working the way they should. Good Luck All!!!!!
Really? I’ve never heard that before – wonder if you just had a bad cable? Interesting info… Thanks for the note!
Hi everyone,
I just put together my first sys. I got a package deal (p5n-d/intel-quad/and corsair 2gx2.)
When the sys first booted, I remember it saying to use c++2005 or later to make best use of this board. I loaded xp pro on a new wd 500g drive. (thinking I’ll get online soon as I’m up and running) Plus I loaded a bunch of other software. Everything was working beautifully.
Then I thought I’d get the updated os files from the net. Come to find out I don’t have ethernet drivers. I then look to the asus driver disk in hopes getting online. Ah there’s the screen of death everyones been talking about. I’ve read many have this problem.
And many different opinions to solve it.
I’ve concluded it was a driver problem from the asus disc, just before I found this great post here.
I have another hd with xppro installed and I can still boot from it. So the disc has some bad drivers corrupting the hd.
Now I have several questions of how to proceed.
Throw the disc away? What other drivers on the disc might I need? Are they corrupt too?
I can’t believe this post started over 6 months ago, and asus is still handing out bad drivers. Even after there are obviously remedies.
Any suggestions/comments would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for the “good” information though.
Hi a2,
Personally, the only time I use the drivers on the disk in the box is when I don’t have another PC around that can access the Net.
The disk has a few things on it: Drivers and Utilities.
I would get all of the latest drivers directly from NVidia as they are generic for the 750i chipset (http://www.nvidia.com and look for nforce drivers), and then you can download the Utilities from Asus, as they are specific to asus/p5n-d : http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&model=P5N-D
Download the drivers first and verify that everything is working, etc. Then you can download the utilities. The utilities that I would bother with are the AsusProbe (which checks temps, etc.) and the AI Suite, which allows you to use “profiled” and supposedly asus approved overclocking settings directly from within Windows. The other utilities are either useless (AI Direct Link, IMO) or dangerous (Asus UPDATE) and not worth having.
The Asus disk is nothing more than a pretty coaster at this point, as what’s on it is likely quite aged compared to what is available online.
Hope that helps! Thanks for dropping a note…
Cheers,
Andy
Thanks for the quick response.
A bad cable? Your referring to sata… But that wouldn’t explain the system running smoothly prior to loading drivers from the disc… I’m still trying to get this heap up & running.
Or worst come to worst, return the board/package.
Thanks
Hi a2 – Sorry, the cable response was for the comment ABOVE yours.
I really need some help on this one. I’ve tried to do everything that has been posted on the forums and at some points it seemed like things were going smoothly until the computer just randomly freezes. The only things I have installed are the latest drivers from nvidia (as of today.) for both my P5N-D 750i motherboard and my geforce 8800GT. I installed these after I reformated my harddrive and reinstalled windows. I’d also like to add that before I installed the latest drivers I had no freezes/BSOD’s in the many hours I had my computer turned on beforehand, everything worked fine. After I installed, things just went downhill. The same BSOD came back so I unplugged my SATA Dvdrom and installed the 790i mediashield, even with DVD unplugged and the mediashield it still crashes. (doesn’t go to BSOD, just freezes.) and sometimes when I restart my computer it doesn’t even have time to go into the ASUS P5N-D splash before the windows before it freezes.
I switched out my SATA HD for an older IDE HD and it hasn’t crashed..and as it is I can’t hook up my DVD-drive while the IDE is plugged up from the way my computer case is. Please help!
I am really unsure of what to do at this point…please help!
Hi Chris,
Well, if you are getting freezes before you get to the P5N-D splash screen, that is almost assuredly a hardware problem. Since it doesn’t happen with the IDE drive, I would say it limits the potential items to just a few. Possibly you need new SATA cables, or one of your SATA drives has a problem in its firmware, or the SATA controller on your board is bad. There is a possibility that it is a problem with your power supply, though the likelihood of that is minimized by the fact that the IDE drive works. It could potentially be one of the SATA leads from your power supply, but that is a long shot.
I would start by replacing the SATA cables with good quality ones, as that is the easiest to target. If the problem doesn’t go away, I would try with another SATA HD (if you have one, or can borrow a spare from a friend). If that doesn’t work, its likely the motherboard itself, and its time to call Asus and get a replacement, IMO.
Not fun at all my friend… I’m so sorry for the challenges you are having! Best of luck. Let me know if you have any other questions!
Cheers,
A
Well, I updated my chipset drivers, as advised, but the USB drivers did not seem to change. They are still using the Microsoft drivers. Do I have to go to each USB entry in device manager and uninstall/reinstall?
Something interesting…I just noticed on ASUS website, there is new chipset driver 15.24 for this mobo, and it includes a GPU driver v175.40
The latest video driver on nvidia website is 181.22
ASUS also has a new BIOS 10.01 just release this month.
More on USB 2.0…all WinXP SP1 or later include USB 2.0 drivers, so ASUS does not install any. The CD has a USB2.0 driver included, but it does not install it if it detects WinXP SP1 or later. My USB problem must be due to something else.
OK, I solved my USB problem, and it had nothing to do with drivers. My Kingston Data Traveller apparently requires TWO free drive letters to work. For administrative users, there must be at least one free letter following the physical drives, if network drives are mapped. I had two network shares mapped, one to B: and one to G:. Drive letters C:, D:, E: and F: were used for physical drives. If either of those network shares was not connected, the flash drive would show up on one of them. If both were connected, then the flash drive just wouldn’t show up. So I remapped the network drives to Y: and Z: and now the flash drive works as it should.
Now, to see if the new chipset drivers will fix my SLI BSOD.
Hi David – I have some crow to eat. I should have checked before telling you that the MS driver would be a problem. I’m running the latest x64 Vista Nvidia drivers and my USB components are running the MS driver as well.
Sorry for sending you down that path.
My sincerest apologies!
Good sleuthing on the free drive letters!
Again, sorry for the incorrect info!
Thank you! I installed the new driver because those BSODs are driving me nuts. I hope this fixes it
You are most welcome! Best of luck, and thanks for dropping a note!
Let us know how it goes…
Cheers,
A
Thanks for the help Andy, I’ve done a few things since I last posted, one of which was to reformat my harddrive AGAIN.
This time however instead of installing the nforce 750i drivers I simply opted not to install them, while just installing my geforce 8800 drivers and my intel pro/1000 network card drivers. Also I installed World of Warcraft to test a game out. Same thing happened yet again, things were going smoothly throughout all the installs with no crashes or blue screens and I restarted my computer as directed about an hour after the installs were finished. After rebooting I decided to give WoW a go and jumped on it…well about 5-10 minutes after roaming on my character…bam, BSOD. Computer restarts, gets to the P5N-D splash and freezes there.
Now I turn my computer off and wait for about 10 minutes. I am currently on a different computer with internet unhooked from my currently ‘broke’ computer to post this. Strangely enough after booting up my broke computer without internet it has not crashed. At the moment I am simply letting my computer idle at the WoW login screen without internet plugged up into my ethernet card and it has yet to crash after about an hour of idleing.
Could it be my ethernet adapter? I will post an update if it crashes or goes to BSOD but as it sits it doesn’t seem like it will.
Forgot to mention I also have my sound card drivers installed which is a Sound blaster live! 24-bit, Audigy SE. They are the latest drivers for the card.
Well yet another update: Left my computer on while I slept which was a good 5-6 hours on the WoW login screen and it didn’t crash. Though then I installed Call of Duty 4 and started playing it and after about 5 minutes into a new game my comp crashed again..didn’t go into BSOD, it’s just that the game became slighty garbled and some text from the game had managed to switch characters like some “a” had become “&” signs and things like that. Right afterwards when I attempted to restart it yet again froze at the P5N-D splash logo, I’m thinking that it could be a RAM problem but I am unsure, it seems the longer I leave my computer off after it freezing the longer it takes to freeze again.
Yet another update: Replaced my old ram with a couple of new sticks and have yet to have any BSOD’s or crashes. I’ve been playing WoW for maybe 30 minutes as well as Call of Duty for a little bit now and nothing has messed up. I think my ram was bad.
hey andy,
seems like you are the right person to go to. I recently got the p5n-d asus mobo and for some reason my sound for games/music/applications does not work, but when I tested the 3D sound test with the volume control the sound works perfectly fine with both speakers and headphones. Also the computer reads the driver, but does not read an audio device. The thing is, everytime I plug my headhphones or speakers in the volume control reads it! this is a mystery I can not solve. please help thanks
Hi Duc,
Thanks for dropping a note – sorry for your trouble with the board! Are you using the audio that is directly on the board, or are you using a sound card?
I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean when you say the computer “reads the driver, but does not read an audio device”… Can you explain that? Also, I don’t quite understand what you mean when you say that every time you plug in the headphones or speakers, the “volume control reads it”… Can you also explain that as well? What do you mean in each of these sentences by “reads it”?
Once I better understand the issue, I’ll do my best to help!
Cheers,
Andy
yeah sorry for the unclear note.
My sound card is onboard(p5n-d)
I installed the driver that came with the mobo for the audio. with that there is this “3d testing” in the volume control(the speaker icon in the bottom right tray)
Everytime I plug my headphones in that HD realtek reads the headphones as being plugged in. I then do the audio test that came with the driver and it works, there is sound. But when I run applications like windows media, games, youtube; it does not have any sound and it says “no audio device detected”
Basically its contradicting itself or the softwares are not in sync.
Also I went to dxdiag and device manager and the drivers and sound works there! I also went into bios and checked if onboard sound was enabled and yes it was.
I also tried reinstalling the driver, installing the driver off the asus website(that didnt work), tried independent soundcard drivers for the p5n-d(that didn’t work either)
The bios is up to date, the chipset is up to date.
I’ve ran into a dead end! Stumped!
Hi Duc!
Thanks for the additional information!
Couple more questions:
What OS are you using, XP or Vista (and, what version – home, professional, 64 bit, etc…)?
Regardless of the OS, if you go to the Device Manager, what do you see listed under sound devices?
And, if you see the sound device, do the properties say that the device is working properly?
Also, if you see the device, what does the Driver tab under properties say?
And, again if you see the device, what does the resources tab say? Are there any conflicts?
Hopefully we can solve this!
If we can’t figure it out, I’d recommend buying a $15 soundblaster add-on card. That will work just as well and may have less problems.
Oh – this is probably going to be a stupid question because you ARE getting some sound – BUT… Are you sure that the onboard audio is enabled in the BIOS? I just want to make sure that DirectX isn’t somehow making sound through software and not the hardware. Highly unlikely – doesn’t even make sense really – but, it never hurts to ask…
Cheers,
A
Yes I am running windows xp 32bit service pack 3. Yeah I checked under device manager and dxdiag; everythings A-okay (no conflicts with other drivers or devices). Yes I was getting sound under the HDreltek audio test but not for anything else.
To spoil the fun for you
I eventually figured the problem out. One of the drivers under USBcontrollers: “subus” was interfering with the audio drivers, how I discovered this..go figure it just came to me. I completely removed the driver and behold I have sound in all my applications.
If you ask me I have never encountered or have ever seen this driver/problem before!!! If this ever came up as a problem in another computer it would most likely stump me again. weird yes?
Regardless I want to thank you for your help and timely reply. It was greatly appreciate!!
thanks much,
-Duc Nguyen
Hi Duc!
WOW! I don’t think I ever would have figured that out!
Congratulations on getting to the bottom of the problem! Excellent detective work… 
You are most welcome for any help I provided, though I don’t think I really did much of anything! haha You did all the real work! Anyway, thanks for stopping by and participating in the thread!
Best regards,
Andy
Thanks for posting this information.
I recently purchased a custom built computer with ASUS P5N-D motherboard, GeForce 9800GT video card, WinXP Sp3, Intel E8400 Core2 3.3GHz processor, and 4Gb of Kingston RAM. When it arrived I went to boot it up and BSOD briefly flashed before the computer kept trying to reboot. When I tried to boot into safe mode it said it couldn’t because windows was not yet registered.
I haven’t had any luck with the tech support from the company that built the PC. I should add that I have another computer with identical build and it is working fine. It runs World of Warcraft very nicely.
I attempted to reinstall windows and it seemed to work up until I was installing the ASUS drivers. After the computer tried to reboot when I installed the drivers for the onboard sound card (Realtek ALC883), I got BSOD and a message about TRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (it could’ve been tpql– I can’t read my own notes!) and something about nvgt.sys.. From then it went into the song that never ends rebooting.
I’ve successfully installed Windows again and got the latest drivers (185.85) for my video card installed. The computer rebooted fine. I’m hesitating now because I want to install the sound but I can’t seem to find the drivers online and I’m afraid that the BSOD will return and I will have to go through the install process all over again.
Should I try the 750i drivers? If so, do I just install the whole thing?
What do you think?
Hi Su,
Sorry for the late reply. I don’t use the onboard sound, so I can’t really speak to that issue. I haven’t heard anyone else have those problems, though so hopefully you’ve resolved it with the latest NVidia releases.
One thing to consider is buying a cheap soundblaster and using that. You’ve probably spent more $ in your time than buying several of them would cost you.
Good luck!
Cheers,
A
OK thanks for the tip on this problem! I bought this board over a year ago in a attempt for my 5th build. funny thing I built with the p5n-d with the Q9650 with 4 gigs of ram at first i had a ide dvd rom and two sata dvd burners. and 1 sata tera hard drive. a few months ago I took the ide rom out and added a third dvd burner sata. it ran great with no problems until I decided to format and reinstall windows. and I felt like something was wrong with the raid driver. I never set up a an array last time. I did a search on the web and found this page. I been dealing with the blue screen for a week. about to co crazy. thanks for the info even if i found it 9 months late.
I installed the drivers and set up in bios for jbod and every thing is working great thanks again for this info.
Hi Ray!
Thanks for dropping a note! Glad that the information helped…
Cheers,
A
Man do I wish I read this before exploding my hard drive and installing a fresh one…Luckily it was only my boot as I only use it for the internet and such. Good find though! thanks!
Hi CB,
Thanks for the note! Best of luck with the reinstall – hopefully it will keep all the BSOD’s away.
Cheers,
A
[...] If the problem doesn’t go away, I would try with another SATA HD (if you have one, or can borrow a spare from a friend). If that doesn’t work, its likely the motherboard itself, and its time to call Asus and get a replacement, IMO. Not fun at all my friend… …. I recently purchased a custom built computer with ASUS P5N-D motherboard, GeForce 9800GT video card, WinXP Sp3, Intel E8400 Core2 3.3GHz processor, and 4Gb of Kingston RAM. When it arrived I went to boot it up and …Read more… [...]
Great of you to take the time sharing this with us, much appriciated
so got a sata drive with XP on it i replaced the mother board with this ASUS board and get a BSOD so how do i get those driver on the SATA drive scince i have no access to WINDOWS? and Safe mopde is not an option it just resets???????
Unfortunately, if you can’t get into safe mode there really is no way of doing that. You could try repairing XP, but I doubt that will work well…
[...] The problem is a crappy driver for the SATA drive controller, and as of yet, Asus (in their Heart Touching wisdom) has not fixed the problem. The cure is simple though. Surf on over to NVIDIA.com and select Download Drivers. Under Option 1 select: … I have the same board with an Intel E8400 Core2, SATA hard drive and a GeForce 9400GT video. Unfortunately, I ran short of funds at this point and had to economize on RAM and used an old CD Writer for my drive. …Read more… [...]
Hello everybody, I had the same problem as that guy “Asus GeForce 9800 GT Video Card Problems | HardwareInReview”
I bought this SATA Hard Drive, and… when I installed it, I kept on getting BSOD every 5 minutes or so.
After some research on the internet, I realized that the problem with this motherboard is the chipset (750i SLI). So here’s what I did.
Just go to nvidia’s webpage and download the driver for the 780i chipset and install the part that says “Media Shield” ONLY!!!, nothing more!
Now nvidia got a driver for this specific chipset (750i) after all the replies they got about this BSOD problem. Just do your research, it took me around 4 hours to finally get a solution to this problem… and now I’m all happy =)
Good luck to everyone, and thanks Andrew for all the help you’ve been providing.
Hey, thanks for stopping by my site and dropping a note! Good luck, Andy
I will be trying this tonight!!! Soon as I installed XP it started to reboot and asked me to boot in safe mode.
I do only have XP1 installed on my ASUS P5ND Motherboard and I started to get the BSOD. I have read the SP3 helps with issues too.
I will burn a copy of SP3 and download the NVDIA drivers. I’ll let you know how it works out!
Thanks!