TI4200 weird issues - SOLVED but worth a read - common XP problem with obscure solution

[samajm]

PROBLEM SOLVED - SEE LINK BELOW FOR A SOLUTION

so my GF2 GTS Pro got toasted in the power surges from the big east coast ice storm like 3 weeks ago, along with my power supply...

got a new PS and borrowed a 16mb Jaton to hold me over until Xmas for a new TI4200. i could never get the driver on the Jaton to load. It would get halfway thru the install and then it would say it could not load because the "data was invalid" .. i just figured it was crappy software and ran the card for the basics until now.

well got my TI4200 today and popped it in all ready to get back to some gaming and it's basically doing the same thing. i loaded the driver from the CD today it ran through and loaded fine, restarted and when it came back up it showed "New hardware detected - VGA Adapter (VGA compatible)" it tried to load new software, i said no / restarted and it did the same thing.

So i closed that out and went into device manager and I cannot find any reference to the video card in the device manager. but it does show VGA Adapter - with sub item VGA Adapter ( VGA Compatible) with the yellow '?' over it. It will not let me remove that item but i was able to disable it. that stopped the New hardware detected issue at restart.

So i tried loading the driver again and it seemed to go fine. restarted and i tried to launch Soldier Of Fortune2 and it said OpenGL not activated. card is definitely compatible so not sure why it's not doing it's thing.

i still do not see the vid card referenced in the device manager, so i tried to add new hardware through the MS interface and it goes halfway thru loading and gives me the data invalid thing again. but if i do it thru the CD it goes fine, but doesnt seem to make a differnce when i restart the pc and still no luck on OpenGL. i also DL'd the new Det Pack from nvidia and it still does the same thing.

so in other words manual install from CD/File goes fine, but makes no difference. Add new hardware install and i get the invalid data thing.

the vid card interface is working for maintenance/overclocking etc...and it shows it as using the TI4200 so i'm at least half right

any advice? sounds like some kinda driver issue but i dunno what else to do.

 

[samajm]

WinXP Pro
AMD 1.4ghz
512mb pc2100 DDR
Gainward GF4 TI4200
Santa Cruz TB sound card

well gee..this is real encouraging....crrap, i just reformatted like 2 months ago.

the reason??

 

unseat the card then bootup. Power down, then seat the card, boot into safe mode. uninstall all drivers for it, and try to clean out the registry. I use regcleaner for that. Reboot into normal, load the drivers. Reboot. See if that works.

 

[samajm]

woohoo got it - but what a friggin PITA!! had to do this little trick to get the drivers to install. some really obscure
shiz...i dont understand how they can allow shiz like this to happen
and expect the average person to know how to deal with it. WTF good is plug
and play anyway? as you'll read at the link this is apparently a pretty common
problem with many different pieces of hardware in WinXP. aside from this fix, the
ONLY other solution that i read that worked for people was reformatting and
reinstalling their OS...that's pretty fudged ?

thanks for your help fallen

 

[samajm]

bump for a solution

 

[AZGamer]

To be honest, I simply re-install windows every time I do a major graphics card change, and I assume most people do the same, so this isn't a very common problem.

 

[railer]

re-install windows when you change your graphics card?!?! Are you friggin kidding me? Holy crap...I've never heard of that one before. I change my cards all the time...and never not once have re-instaleld windows once. That would be completely unacceptable.

 

[samajm]

sorry AZ but i disagree. havin to reformat and reinstall for every GFX card change is not something i think most people do...that's ridiculous bro. not saying it's a bad idea or wrong, just overkill in most cases, not to mention time intensive for something so relatively simple.
and if you want to see how common the problem is do a google search for " data is invalid xp " or some combo like that and you'll see what i'm talking about. i found thread after thread of message boards with people complaining about this with no real solution aside from R/R ... here's an article from earlier this year on the issue as well. trust me it's very common. i do my research before i express my opinion.

 

[zShowtimez]

Seeing how you dont have to format to reinstall windows, its not as big a deal as you guys are saying.

 

[samajm]

that's my point, just reinstalling windows did not fix this particular problem. before this fix info came out, people were (and some still are) having to do a complete R/Rl to clear out whatever was causing the hangup.
if you want to reinstall windows just for the heck of it when you pop in a new vid card....go for it...but that has nothing to do with this thread or the problem i reported.

 

[Regalk]

Let me see if I got this correct - when you do do a registry hack to allow you permission to install a piece of HW e.g. video card. Hmm. That is weird. Windows XP has a feature to prevent you from installing non-certified drivers UNLESS you choose to ignore and continue with the install anyway which I have done lots of times e.g. Nvidia's drivers.
I have swapped Motherboard and video cards even NICs/sound cards every 2 months and never encounter any problem reported here. The post that says to reinstall Windows every time you change Video cards obviously is not a power user. You should never have todo that - I never do. Every time WinXp installs a new piece of HW it creates a restore point. Look under the Windows directory for the $NT$##... in blue or some such thing. First make sure you unhide hidden/system files in Explorer. This of course allows you to roll back drivers.
A bit of a ramble but you get my drift.