So, AMD has gone and fucked it up yet again - despite being advised time and time again during RC testing of the 14.4 drivers, they've released a final version with defective AHCI drivers that cause boot-time BSODs.

And now they've fucked up my system so badly that I have to leave the fucking thing in IDE mode now. Despite my eradicating all traces of the AHCI drivers and trying to restore the 13.4 drivers on my PC, AMD have changed something in my system that has completely fucked AHCI on my system now, short of a full reinstall.

Seriously - I'm sick to fucking death of that company, and NVIDIA isn't any better. I'm fed up with PC gaming being one big constant bug hunt and troubleshooting exercise.

So: long story, short meaning - if you have an AMD/ATI Radeon card, use AHCI with SATA drives and are thinking of installing the 14.4 drivers - DON'T.

I'm sorry to hear it but I'm pretty glad you wrote it as I was about to update.

I spent much of this weekend fixing Radeon driver related BSODs. I finally have my 280x working on 13.4 again.

Before this, I had a 560ti which would crash on anything higher that 314.22 nVidia drivers.

Regardless of manufacturer, I can't seem to catch a break either :(

I had quite a few problems with AMD drivers on my tablet as well. Although I can not fully blame AMD for it because the notebook and tablet OEM manufacturers often alter the specifications by AMD in an unforeseeable manner. On top of it many OEM's usually drop Windows driver support for newer versions of Windows as when I switched from Windows 7 to 8 on my tablet for example. The driver situation was barely tolerable. I've gone through some big hurdles before reaching a functioning level again with Windows 8.1 Update 1 now, but it works flawless if you know the tricks. I also never had these problems with my AMD desktop hardware.

From my experience the biggest problems were solved by completely erasing all AMD drivers with the help of their driver cleaner because it seems some remaining drivers will still be picked up by Windows again and again if you simply use the driver uninstall. So go into Windows Safe Mode with administrator privileges and use this utility:
http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMD-Clean-Uninstall-Utility.aspx
Afterwards you should be able to install any older driver release. The hard thing is however to find the latest driver package that still works and does not screw up the system again.

On a side note: The driver cleaner utility was not long ago also damaging Windows 8 by deleting an important registry entry and thus screwing up the UAC which made it nearly impossible to use administrator privileges without turning UAC off. Seems they fixed their driver cleaner now though. If you should have problems after using the utility I can give you a solution which I found lately as well. It is a complicated registry hack, nobody would ever guess. If anybody is interested for the fix because of the UAC problems in Windows 8+, let me know and I will post it as well. The problem can also be easily identified if you have no longer access to energy saving options in Windows and can no longer uninstall programs using the Windows control panel uninstallation.

Anyway, I have not reinstalled Windows ever since using AMD drivers, but the fixing of some problems made me have growing grey hairs directly falling off my head. I'm not bald, but more of these problems and it may as well happen.

AHCI in display drivers sounds really strange. I plan to install 14.4, and I will check whether it has AHCI as part of the install and untick it. Thanks for the heads up.

Edit:

AHCI may be in the display drivers now, but I don't think it was in 13.4, so installing that might not solve your problems. What chipset do you have by the way? Last I tried installing on a 790x I learned at AMD screwed up AHCI for it at some point, and there was some inf file editing required to get it to work. I think it was said to work on newer chipsets.

Sorry to hear OP :(. I used to update my ati/amd drivers regularly til i worked out it really wasnt worth the effort for me....

I can't remember if they were included in the graphics drivers for 13.4, but there was a separate download package for chipset drivers, which was also version 13.4. As it stands, you can download either the entire bundle containing video driver, AHCI driver and all the other useless shit that comes bundled with it, or just the chipset drivers. Both contain AHCI drivers.

I've managed to dig up a disc image that's a couple of weeks old and have restored that now. Am attempting to install 14.4 sans AHCI driver...wish me luck.

Good luck.

Still wondering if you're using an old chipset or they managed to screw up newer ones as well.

uhoh i just updated my, no issues so far tho - wonder if it has to do with that usb thing they added, sorry that your having all kinds of issues just plain sucks when companies release updates with major issues like this.

Seems to be fine so far now without the AHCI drivers...so it wasn't the USB filter driver. It's a relatively old chipset (7-series, approx. anno 2008), but one that is explicitly still supported by the new drivers.

You might want to try to unistall first with AMD's uninstall tool and then run DDU to remove any drivertraces left before re-installing.

As I mentioned in my first post, the 7x0 series (I had a 790X) have had a problem with drivers for a while now. IIRC It can be solved by editing the inf file. I don't have a reference offhand, but you can google for it if you're interested.

Reading this has left me feeling a little better.
About two weeks ago the power surge protector attached to my main PC fried, and when I changed it over and attempted to turn on my PC it would get as the log in screen before crashing out. Starting in safemode got me no further, nor did attempts to start up in Ubuntu.

I thought that maybe my C drive was frazzeled too so I have a new harddrive on order so I can begin an attempt at reinstalling a brand new C drive without harm to the other drives in there, but reading this I am now worried that the AMD processor could have a problem too.

God damn technology sometimes.

Not to mention the drivers that basically made many classic games unplayable with AtI cards.......

Nvidia drivers are nothing to write home about, but they are not the total fuck up that ATI drivers have been lately.

I updated last night to v14.4, but I don't have any issues so far... and yes, my system uses AHCI with 4 SATA drives (3 HDD + 1 DVD), under Windows 7 64-bit SP1.

By the way, I uninstalled the previous stable drivers completely, rebooted, deleted the remainings files manually (except my profile configurations), cleared the registry, and then installed the new drivers (custom install to avoid installing the AMD Gaming Evolved App client).