Looks like my new video card is in trouble.

Felecha

Golden Member
Sep 24, 2000
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Replaced my motherboard over the weekend, with lots of kindly help over in the motherboard forum. Been fine for 2 days.

ASRock Dual-SATA2, Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 1GB Corsair RAM, MSI RX300HM-TD128E PCIe - x16.

This morning I rebooted and it came up with my custom color scheme reverted to XP default. Hmmmmm.

Left it that way, came home from work and found some icons in Outlook Express showing pink stripey rectangles like a background around them. Hmmm!!!

Rebooted again and now the splash screen looked like it was at the lowest VGA color setting. After that it went black for several minutes, then BSOD and the message that ati2dvag was in an infinite loop.

Rebooted, got the "We apologize ... do you want Safe Mode etc" screen, but it was in gibberish. As if the ASCII characters were all there but mixed up, shifted down the ASCII set. Like a kid's code where all letters get substituted consistently for others.

Chose safe mode, uninstalled the video drivers, rebooted, hoped New Hardware Found would come up. It did, and I reinstalled the drivers but no good.

Since then I've tried all kinds of tricks but it's getting worse. Now the delays in getting into Safe Mode are getting to be several minutes long. At first I would get the desktop and icons but now it's freezing on the Found Hardware thing. Cant get past that.

At the end of my rope here. Any ideas?

I wish I had another card to substitute
 

dug777

Lifer
Oct 13, 2004
24,778
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hmmm, that happened to me when my first 9800 pro cooked itself, i left it running some 3d aquarium screensaver while i went to the pub, crawled home 12 hours later and it was artifact central. My icons were all slightly corrupted after than, even the boot splash was messed up...i rma'd it and the next one worked perfectly...
 

Eureka

Diamond Member
Sep 6, 2005
3,822
1
81
Sounds like it had a meltdown.... well hey, there's an excuse to get a new card. :D

Did you try calling the manufacturer? Maybe you need to RMA it.

Norm
 

Felecha

Golden Member
Sep 24, 2000
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If the card is not actually gone bad it seems like i ought to be able to get back to the first state I had when I booted the new board - it came up with a generic video driver since the screen resolution was limited. Can I not get back to that somehow? I can "Uninstall" the card but how to get to the generic driver when it comes up with Found new Hardware?

I can currently get to Safe Mode (most of the time, and when I do it takes forever to get there and it's icy slow when I do) and uninstall the driver there, and reinstall it when Found New comes up. So it can't be completely dead
 

Felecha

Golden Member
Sep 24, 2000
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Well, I was able to use the ATI Uninstall utility while in Safe Mode. That somehow cleared things so it booted up all the way, and at normal speed, but it was unable to go above the minimum resolution. I decided to see if simply reinstalling the drivers from the CD would work, maybe just one little thing went wrong before. As long as I could undo it again it seemed worth a try.

I had forgotten that when I ran it the first time I got the XP Warning - This is not digitally signed! If you continue it may screw your whole computer! I've seen that a couple of times and continued anyway and never had a problem

Maybe it really does matter for this one. It says to go to the vendors site and get a signed driver. I've had no luck with that so far!

 

Eureka

Diamond Member
Sep 6, 2005
3,822
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Did you use ATi.com drivers? That's as stable as it gets. Otherwise, it might just be another problem.

Norm
 

Felecha

Golden Member
Sep 24, 2000
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I went to ati and got two versions of their Catalyst setup. I've had practice now at installing and crashing and removing all the ATI stuff
(ATI has a utility that removes ALL ATI software from your machine) and booting back to a basic VGA. Every time I install I get a BSOD saying ati2dvag is in an infinite loop. When I remove it all again it boots smoothly. I even installed the drivers and crashed and went to safe mode and removed ONLY ati2dvag and it booted smoothly but then when it got to the desktop it objected that the ATI driver was no good and I was being sent back to a VGA.

So right now I have 800x600 and 4-bit color. At least it works.

Is there some OLDER driver somewhere that does not use ati2dvag but will run this card? I do no gaming, no big graphics demands. I have a Samsung 1100p Plus that ran fine on a Matrox G400 Millenium for years. The new card is PCIexpress x16