No one is on top of the latest graphics card update as AMD and Nvidia have provided drivers that can harm your PC. First, Nvidia had a relatively simple CPU overuse issue that occurred after exiting the game, and the basic workaround was to simply roll back to the previous driver. Second, in rare cases AMD drivers can completely damage your Windows installation.
Uh. It’s a big deal, but it’s not really AMD’s fault, even though it was released in both this latest Adrenalin driver and the previous one. Blame it on Windows’ penchant for updating the operating system at all costs.
The February 23.2.1 Adrenalin driver, as well as the current 23.2.2, can completely crash your machine, as happened to a bunch of Radeon owners. They documented their pain and the “weird” steps they took to back it up and run tests after a driver update killed it.
It seems the problem is that on the rare occasions when Windows decides that no matter what you do, it just needs to update something while you install the new AMD drivers, it will crash the system. Chacos found his installation to be fine until he had to reboot, at which point he went through a continuous boot cycle > BSOD. The alternative, stemming from careful back and forth with AMD engineers, is to press the power switch on your PC for a split second between the BIOS key options screen and the appearance of the spinning Windows logo. This will encourage the auto-restore event, which in turn allows you to choose from several advanced options to organize your system.
That’s easier said than done, as Chacos had to press the power button on fifteen different pairs of shoes before he even picked it up.
Fixing boot errors will make things worse, but performing a system restore to a previous restore point should make everything work again. A long way ahead due to a combination of AMD drivers and Windows-defined update processes, but at least a solution.
To prevent this from happening when you update your drivers, AMD recommends that you uncheck the Factory reset box in the Adrenalin settings option. This is really only necessary if you’re updating from an Nvidia card (though sometimes that doesn’t even help), so you should uncheck it for now.