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Nvidia Driver Issue with Windows Home Server

If you built your own Windows Home Server and are using either integrated graphics or a video card that has Nvidia chips on it then you could run into problems if you upgrade the video driver.

A graphic driver update released in October is causing havoc on many Home Server installs by not allowing users to log in via the Console or Remote Desktop and even a driver roll back does not work forcing many to do a server reinstall.

The driver version at the cause of the problem is GeForce Release 178.24 which was released October 15, 2008 to add support for motherboards with integrated GeForce 9-series GPUs, mainly the GeForce 9400 and the GeForce 9300.

Version 178.24 has now been superseded by release 180.48 released November 19, 2008 which presently has NOT been tested alongside Windows Home Server, so use this updated version with caution!

Neither release has no mention of a compatibility issue in their release notes, although fellow enthusiast Christopher Price and myself have experienced this issue.

Nvidia Driver Downloads.

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  1. Just to clarify the “testing” aspect.

    NVIDIA instructs Windows Server 2003 x86 users (that includes Windows Home Server) to use the Windows XP version of their ForceWare drivers.

    NVIDIA only maintains separate drivers for Windows Server 2003 x64 edition.

    While 180.48 is now out, it does not provide support for older GPUs (like the GeForce 6200), leaving 178.24 the latest for many.

  2. john says:

    this would explain why i can’t acces my home server any more via remote desktop….

    i’ll dl the previous drivers asap.

    thanks for that info.

  3. john says:

    i’ve installed older drivers from nvidia and it works again…

    thanks for that info.(i was going nuts trying to understand what was going wrong…)

  4. John, as I noted in my article… that doesn’t appear to work (but, I’m not telling you not to try). Rolling back the driver doesn’t fix the issue.

    I haven’t had a lot of time to work on it, but it may be that the latest ForceWare driver adds DLLs which aren’t in prior versions… and the presence of those DLLs is causing the problem.

  5. john says:

    i’ve actualy done a clean install of whs…and i couldn’t figure out why i couldn’t access whs via remote desktop.

    i didn’t do a rollback, i’ve just downloaded and installed the 175 version. its not the best and cleanest way to do it but it worked…

  6. Sam Sneed says:

    THANK YOU! I was pulling my hair out over this. I rolled back to the Windows standard VGA driver, downloaded 175.19 and all is good again. THANK YOU!

  7. Aonsaithya says:

    Thank you! This confirmed what I feared. I managed to install the 180.84 drivers, but after a reboot I realised that my 6200 is no longer working. I have both a 8800GTS for my dual monitors and a 6200 for a HDTV connected to this PC. I tried reinstalling, and realised that it does not even try installing the drivers for the 6200.
    I uninstalled the devices in device manager, then used Driver Cleaner Pro (a very good program) to sweep away the leftovers. After that I unplugged the ethernet cable, rebooted into Windows, DISABLED ANTIVIRUS (important, I’ve gotten corrupted driver installations otherwise), then installed 178.24.
    I suppose I’ll be stuck with these drivers, then.

  8. Yak says:

    I also had the same problems following the Jan 09 WHS updates.

    I found a work around using a registry entry from here;

    http://blogs.technet.com/brad_rutkowski/ar…ed-to-load.aspx

    http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtop…sktop&st=60

    Incidentally, when I removed the registry edit and upgraded my nVidia drivers to the latest version, the registry modification also appeared on my WHS.

    Have documented more fully the steps I took here

    http://forum.wegotserved.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=6162

  9. Yak says:

    The first two links in my previous post that don’t appear to work are properly linked to from in the wegotserved forum post.

    Alternatively if you use the search term

    brad rutkowski + rdpdd.dll failed to load

    in google it is the first link found. In Brad’s Server 2003 blog post there is a link to the nVidia post.

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