Help me make an expensive video card useful

Kirnwaffen · April 10, 2003, 21:40

Sigh... I have no luck with computers. A couple of months ago, I got a Radeon 9700 pro. It was working great... and then I upgraded to Windows XP. Now, Windows refuses to load while the card is enabled. I've tried the service pack, all the recent windows updates, new drivers, and a clean boot. Occasionally, after a bit wrangling, I can get everything to load up, but I have never been able to repeat them on reboot.

My configuration:

PIII 800
Intel D815E motherboard (latest BIOS update)
Firewire card
20 GB hardrive with 5 GB windows partition and 15 GB other partition
Sony 40x cd-ROM
HP cd-Writer cd16
NEC MultiSync LCD 1700M+

The card works fine for standard VGA when the driver is disabled, and works through post. It quits after the "Loading Windows XP" screen. Any help would be appreciated.

Pekka · April 10, 2003, 21:43

"... then I upgraded to Windows XP.", there's your problem

.

notyoueither · April 10, 2003, 21:43

Powered by or Made by drivers?

Kirnwaffen · April 10, 2003, 21:50

Quote:

Powered by or Made by drivers?

Not sure. How do I tell? They were downloaded from the ATI web site.

notyoueither · April 10, 2003, 21:54

There are different drivers for cards made by ATI themselves rather than cards with their chips made by third parties.

If your card came in the big red and black box with the nifty illustration, it is made by ATI and you get the driver from here:
http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html

If your card was OEM, or in a non ATI box, you get the driver from here:
http://mirror.ati.com/support/drivers/powered.html

Kirnwaffen · April 10, 2003, 21:56

Oh, ok. My card is definitely made by ATI, so I believe I have the appropriate drivers.

notyoueither · April 10, 2003, 22:00

Sorry, gotta go, but Asher should be along before too long. I think he has or had one of those.

Asher · April 10, 2003, 22:10

Sounds like the drivers are corrupted, or maybe there's a rare crashbug in ATI's Win2K/XP drivers.

Boot into safemode (or VGA, whatever you want) and go into Add/Remove Programs, then remove the ATI drivers, then try installing them again.

I personally don't own a Radeon right now, I used to have a 7200 but the drivers had a tendancy to crash.

But it's not so rare that mis-matched versions of drivers get installed, even when you try reinstalling.

So try uninstalling the drivers and installing the latest from ATI's website again.

Kirnwaffen · April 10, 2003, 22:12

Yeah, I tried. Unfortunately, the problem persists.

Asher · April 10, 2003, 22:16

Are there older versions of the drivers you could try? Or beta versions?

Your best shot is probably to call ATI.

Kirnwaffen · April 10, 2003, 22:23

I've gone through just about every version of the driver I could find, and still nothing. The best I've been able to do is to get it to work for one boot, but the problem returns every reboot, and I've never been able to isolate any specific issue that affects this. I'm beginning to wonder if the problem has less to do with drivers, and more to do with Windows. Perhaps I had a bad install.

Kirnwaffen · April 10, 2003, 22:45

Well, after not being able to copy files from my XP CD that MS knowledge base says I should be able to copy, I'm finding my suspicions from the above post harder to ignore.

Asher · April 10, 2003, 22:48

So try reinstalling Windows.

Kirnwaffen · April 10, 2003, 22:50

I think I'm going to need a new CD. Maybe I can grab one tomorrow. Until then, VGA, here I come...

Urban Ranger · April 11, 2003, 11:03

Possible IRQ conflict?