HELP! - 5900XT installation

[ArmyFCS]

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated -

Purchased a Aopen 5900XT from Newegg...arrived yesterday and tried to install. (Uninstalled previous card/drivers) Hardware manager came up with two operations

1. New VGA controller (VGA compatible)
2. 5900XT - YES!

Well - I keep getting an hardware error for the VGA controller - says the hardware could not be installed and that the data was invalid. So I go to the device manager/display adatper(getting a big ?) and the card is not being recognized. I tried to install the drivers from the CD that came with the card - no luck again...went to the Aopen site to install latest and greates...no luck. Made sure all Nvidia drivers were updated - no problem. Still getting the same error message. I bought the Compaq XP 3000+ deal that was goign on a few weeks ago.... put a 400W PSU in and upgraded mem to 1G PC2700. Contacted COMPAQ support - they could not figure it out- did the whole safe mode uninstall/reinstall etc. When first purchased it recognized my old GEForce 3 card and installed no problem. So can anyone tell me if this is a card issue/return?

Overall noob to modding computers - so please let me know what you think is wrong.

Thanks in advance

 

[ArmyFCS]

bump

 

[jlmadyson]

I have this same card in one of my rigs. When I initially got the card I first ensured that the bios settings were correct with agp set. Then I fired up the computer and disabled the on board graphics controller. Shut down the computer and placed the card in the available agp slot. Started the computer and Windows Xp took over. At first XP attempted to install whatever the hell drivers it felt, but I then went into my computer hardware settings and updated the drivers with the Aopen driver cd by selecting the choose own drivers selection. After this everything went smooth as butta and downloaded the latest from nvidia and through on powerstrip. This card overclocks like a mug, and I hope you are able to get it working for you. Your agp slot supports 4x/8x I'm assuming?

 

[ArmyFCS]

Well... the computer initially just used on-board video - that is when I put my GeForce3 card into the AGP slot... and like I said it fired right up. I went into the device manger and tried to update the drivers thru that but I am still getting the "Video controller (VGA Compatible) error ....... data is invalid" RMA it?

JP

 

[AnnoyedGrunt]

I had this exact same problem and it is NOT the CARD! You don't need to RMA.

Here's my story and how I solved the problem, but I don't know if you want to try it or try something else:

First, I had a Leadtek Winfast GF3 Ti200. Around January or Feb, I bought a 5900XT form newegg. I had the exact same problem (it went through the driver install, but when it went to activate the card with the new drivers, it would say "blah, blah, blah, data is invalid." It was also recognizing the card as a 5900, so I thought the BIOS was flashed wrong and I RMA'd the card. My second 5900XT did the same thing, so I bought a 9700Pro. It also did the same thing. I used Driver Cleaner, uninstalled everything, and still couldn't get things working.

MY SOLUTION:
So, I finally backed up my data and formatted the HDD. I reinstalled Windows and lo-and-behold, everything was fine. So, I sold the 5900XT to a friend and kept the 9700Pro.

WHAT I THINK HAPPENED:
When I first installed the Leadtek, I used Leadtek's drivers instead of the reference drivers. I think that over time, I ended up with an old set of drivers and registry settings from Leadtek that were never uninstalled. Since they were Leadtek specific, I was never able to clean them out with Driver Cleaner. I therefore will never again install the MFG specific drivers, and will instead stick with the reference ones from now on.

ANOTHER OPTION FOR YOU:
If you know how to mess with the registry well, then you might be able to track down old settings and get rid of them. Otherwise, you may want to try to do one of the windows "repair installations" where you insert the install disk but instead of doing a brand new install you try and repair the existing one (this would be attempted before messing with the HDD). If that doesn't work, then you could always fall back to the format/reinstall which would definitely work.

Maybe some others can give additional ideas.

Ironically, it was this problem that caused me to finally join the AT forums so I could ask how to fix it. Circle of life, baby!

EDIT: I notice that you too had a GF3....interesting...
EDIT: I notice from my join date that I had the 5900XT in Jan.

-D'oh!