Sudden Catalyst driver failure?

Schism · August 12, 2015

First, my PC. I built it a year ago, a standard budget setup - AMD FX-6300, ASUS R9 270, Corsair CX500, 8Gb of HyperX Fury RAM, Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDD, and it's all sitting on an ASUS M5A78L motherboard. It's not a beast, but enough for me.

Now we come to the issue part of this post. I've installed Catalyst 15.7 drivers right after they were released, so maybe 10-12 days ago and there were no problems whatsoever. This morning I was playing Hearthstone and it started throwing some artifacts on the screen. I thought it was due to the temperature, so I took the computer apart, cleaned it up and changed thermal compound on both CPU and GPU (even though they were running at 65-70 degrees celsius max anyways, no overclocking). 5 minutes after I booted it up again, this happened: http://i.imgur.com/FAQfopR.jpg

Then it went to black and back to normal after a few seconds, but an alert popped up (not the exact words, but you'll know which one it is): "AMD drivers stopped responding, but it's back to normal". Before I managed to check what could be causing it, my PC rebooted and kept getting stuck on loading screen with artifacts as can be seen here: http://imgur.com/7sFZ91z,AzvYQzt#0

I've tried booting it up 3 times, but each time it was getting stuck at the same moment, just different artifact patterns. It also kept going black and back to the loading screen again every few seconds.

So, I started the computer up in troubleshooting mode (or emergency mode? not sure of the english name). I used Display Driver Uninstaller (ex-Driver Sweeper) to uninstall the Catalyst drivers and it booted up normally. So, i installed the 15.7 drivers again and the same thing as before happened. So, I went into windows troubleshooting mode again, uninstalled the drivers and now here I am, with no display drivers, wondering whether I should install an older driver version, or maybe it's pointless because it's a HDD failure? Or maybe a GPU issue? No idea, I hope you can help me out with this, since google search comes up empty.

EDIT: Just noticed I forgot to say what my OS is. It's Windows 7 Home Edition 64 bit (original).

EDIT #2: Tried installing an older driver version (14.9) and it's the same issue...