Doh- I ruined my system

[skace]

Hi there everybody,

I decided to create an account here at anandtech and post and see if anyone else had run into this problem and/or knows where to start.

Yesterday, after playing Giants for awhile and having a lot of problems with slowness in-game I decided to update to directx8 on my win2k box. This went all well and good, I rebooted and my machine was still in 1 piece. Then I went and updated my Det drivers from 618 to 631, rebooted and the sh*t hit the fan. It would allow me to login but about 4 seconds after logging into my win2k box it would come to a complete halt. I tried a few things but ended up going into safe mode and completely uninstalling my nvidia detonator win2k drivers from add/remove. This allowed me to log back into my machine normally with the default VGA driver. Now this is where I've been stuck since. From here I've tried installing Detonator drivers 618, 631, and 717. Everytime I get the same scenario: After the install finishes copying the files the screen flickers and comes back completely halted and after a hard reboot the machine is back with default VGA drivers.

I will list some specs incase they are of any help:
Athelon 700 w/ an Asus k7v mob
256 megs of PC133 Ram
(2) 30 gig IBM Deskstars UATA 100
Santa Cruz Sound Card
Creative Annihilator Pro 256 DDR Video Card
Can't think of any other specs worthy of noting but if anyone needs anything else I'd be willing to find out on the PC...

Thanks in advance for any help. I was trying to hold out until the nv20 for my next system, so I'm hoping I won't have to buy a new video card when the nv20 is right around the corner 🙂

- skace

 

[lsd]

Go into safe mode and delete the vga adapter from there, then reinstall the 6.xx drivers, then reboot.

 

[skace]

Heh, I'm about to sound really stupid =( but I couldn't find VGA Adapter under device listings. Could you tell me where it is located at? Boy I'm feeling dumb tonight.

 

[skace]

Oops, I clicked "Show Hidden Devices" and up popped a whole bunch of other things, 2 of which were 'vga' and 'vgasave'. I'm guessing that the vga adapter would be the one listed as VGA? I will look for your confirmation although I might just go ahead and delete it now 😀 Not like my system could get any worse..

 

[skace]

I tried deleting 'vga' but it didn't work - same problem. It froze almost instantly after copying all the driver files to the system32 directory. The screen flickered and then nothing.... This is a pain in the bum.

 

[Biggs]

Try patching your system with the latest VIA 4-in-1 driver.

 

[skace]

Argh!~ I ended up disabling Fast Write in the BIOS and it stopped freezing 4 secs after booting. Strange... I thought I disabled this before. Although, It seems the 4-in-1 drivers and multiple other amd patches are not currently installed on my pc, should I put these on, or stick with the damn thing working for now 😀. Thanks for the help guys.

-skace