AMD has officially acknowledged the existence of a rare bug within its Radeon driver version Adrenalin 23.2.1 which caused windows installations to become bricked.
AMD Drivers Bricking Windows Installs
This issue was reported earlier this year and was extremely rare, those unfortunate enough to encounter it after installing the drivers would be met with an inaccessible boot drive error when they restarted their computer forcing them to reinstall Windows. No official statement was made about it until now where AMD admitted that they have been able to replicate the issue and have found the culprit to be the “factory reset” option within the adrenalin driver installation software.
In a conversation with PCWorlds Brad Chacos, who has been documenting this issue, AMD released this statement:
“We have reproduced an issue that can occur in an extremely small number of instances if a PC update occurs during the installation of AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition, and we are actively investigating. We recommend users ensure all system updates are applied or paused before installing the driver, and that the “Factory Reset” option is unchecked during the AMD driver installation process. We are committed to resolve issues as quickly as possible and strongly encourage users to submit issues with AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition via the Bug Report Tool.”
How To Avoid The Bug
So the simple way of avoiding this bug is to not check the “Factory Reset” tickbox when you install the AMD drivers. If it is imperative that you need the box checked, you’ll have to wait until AMD release an official fix for this issue or instead just use Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) which is free software that cleans up your old display drivers and helps out with system stability when it comes to bugs with GPU drivers.
Were you unfortunate enough to experience this issue? Let us know in the comments.
