Annoying video driver problem.

[banksie]

Recently my venerable Epox 8K3A motherboard suffered a meltdown due to faulty power supply capacitors. Thankfully it died without taking anything else with it beyond the replacement PSU I plugged in to try and diagnose the problem.

So I have switched over to an ASUS K8S-MX board with an Athlon 64 3000+ processor and done a repair install build of Windows XP to get it back into a happy place. Everything is working except the video drivers. If I try to install the Catalyst drivers I get told that I am missing the required 'hardware or software' to install them. Occasionlly I also get the dread 'INF missing' error.

So I figure removing the drivers completely, cleaning with Driver Cleaner Pro 1.2 and changing the driver for the card to the 'Standard VGA' one in the Device Manager is the way to go. Except that the Driver Wizard doesn't list 'Standard VGA' even when I tell it that I will choose from a list of all hardware - not just compatible hardware.

Clearly somehow the standard VGA driver has been removed from my driver database.

Does anyone have any pratical suggestions for fixing this? I'd prefer to not do a rebuild of the entire system as I have three tonne of applications installed that I would have to reconfigure etc...

The stupid thing is that if I use the Device manager to manually install the drivers, then the card does work. But various things like SmartGart aren't loaded and the TVout properties become impossible to configure. (So I can't configure Theatre Mode correctly despite being able to turn in on and use it.)

Help!

 

[2senile]

I can only suggest trying what I used to do on my ATi systems.

Uninstall driver, uninstall CP, open Regedit & remove the two ATi keys, go to device manager & delete whatever is listed under display adapter, reboot & choose "have disk" when the dialog box comes up.

Been a while since I've done an update on ATi cards but I never ran into any problems getting new drivers to install.

 

[banksie]

I can only suggest trying what I used to do on my ATi systems.

Uninstall driver, uninstall CP, open Regedit & remove the two ATi keys, go to device manager & delete whatever is listed under display adapter, reboot & choose "have disk" when the dialog box comes up.

Been a while since I've done an update on ATi cards but I never ran into any problems getting new drivers to install.

Which two registry keys are you referring to?

I suspect I am kinda doing this - just via Driver Cleaner but I am prepared to give anything a whirl at this point.

Using the device manager to install the drivers is causing oddness because it doesn't seem to be getting the TV out control quite right.

 

[hoom]

I suspect Mobo driver conflict due to repair windoze install & different mobo.

 

[banksie]

I suspect Mobo driver conflict due to repair windoze install & different mobo.

'k. Quite possibly. How do I cure it besides rebuilding the entire system? Also what kinds of errors in the Event Viewer should I be looking for?

 

[hoom]

Pass.
Possibly GART or similar?

 

[banksie]

Well it gets more bizarre.

I decided to rebuild the entire system from the ground up (this was, after all, a WinXP upgrade from Windows98Se that had migrated across two motherboards now, the cruft level was getting bad.).

Blow me, if it doesn't have precisely the same problem. I have no smartgart service installed and the drivers refuse to do an automated install. I have even tried downloading the unbundled Catalyst 5.6 pack - there the control panel and Catalyst Control Centre install just fine. The driver installer packs a bit of a sulk.

This has me thoroughly bemused. What the heck is going on here?

 

[Frank]

Did you try to make a bootable flash floppy? Try that, and have the flash program list the current config.

If I had to guess, I think you've got a conflict with the on-board video. Try turning that off completely in the BIOS.

 

[banksie]

Did you try to make a bootable flash floppy? Try that, and have the flash program list the current config.

If I had to guess, I think you've got a conflict with the on-board video. Try turning that off completely in the BIOS.

I've disabled it in the BIOS. But what I do notice is that ACPI seems to be shovelling all the PCI cards, including the graphics card, onto one or two IRQs. I vaguely remember having to disable ACPI with my last motherboard so I wonder if that is it.

Anyhoo what program do you recommend for dumping the system configuration? I am a bit new to creating flash boot discs but am willing to give it a go...

 

[Frank]

Try this one. (ATI Customer Care > Drivers and Software > Utilities > Various > ATI Adapter Utilities ) It runs in Windows, and it is the recommended tool from ATI.

My experience with on-board video is: sometimes switching to another videocard works automatically and well, other times you have to keep turning off stuff in the BIOS until it works at all.

So try and see what the program says, and try disabling all things in the BIOS that could be related. ACPI, re-allocating IRQ's, etc. If both don't work, you might want to check the videocard in another computer, to see if it isn't broken.

 

[banksie]

Try this one. (ATI Customer Care > Drivers and Software > Utilities > Various > ATI Adapter Utilities ) It runs in Windows, and it is the recommended tool from ATI.

My experience with on-board video is: sometimes switching to another videocard works automatically and well, other times you have to keep turning off stuff in the BIOS until it works at all.

So try and see what the program says, and try disabling all things in the BIOS that could be related. ACPI, re-allocating IRQ's, etc. If both don't work, you might want to check the videocard in another computer, to see if it isn't broken.

Slight problem is that I don't have another computer available to try it in. Also the fact that forcing the drivers to load causes the card to work suggests to me that if the card is damaged is can't be particularly seriously - after all I can run 3Dmark05 and 3Dmark03 benchmarks on it without issue.

I wonder if my big error is putting the Creative Audio card into slot 1 forcing it and the 9800 to share an interrupt. Given Creative's reputation with their hardware I half wonder if it is masking IRQ requests to the graphics card, causing the auto-detection to fail.

It is going to have to share an IRQ with one card. Being a micro ATX board I only have two PCI slots and I have two PCI cards I want to use - A Creative Audigy and a Creative Dxr3 card.

Anyway I'll muck around with the utilities there and see what I can find.

 

[Frank]

I wonder if my big error is putting the Creative Audio card into slot 1 forcing it and the 9800 to share an interrupt. Given Creative's reputation with their hardware I half wonder if it is masking IRQ requests to the graphics card, causing the auto-detection to fail.

It is going to have to share an IRQ with one card. Being a micro ATX board I only have two PCI slots and I have two PCI cards I want to use - A Creative Audigy and a Creative Dxr3 card.

That might be the problem. But it depends on how the IRQs are mapped, as you only have 4 slots total (including the hidden one for the on-board video), of which only 3 can be used at the same time.

But try it in any case, to make sure.

 

[banksie]

That might be the problem. But it depends on how the IRQs are mapped, as you only have 4 slots total (including the hidden one for the on-board video), of which only 3 can be used at the same time.

But try it in any case, to make sure.

Currently IRQ 11 is being shared with the VGA card and the two device on the audio card. (Multimedia device and an Input device according to the BIOS screen. Presumably the audio processor and the IEEE 1394 port respectively.). I've set the graphics card options to AGP/PCI and disabled shared memory which should completely disable the onboard video system.

Anyhoo, further testing when I get home from work. Will report results here.

 

[banksie]

Well I have it working now, but I am not sure why the difference.

I stripped the machine down to just the graphics card, keyboard and mouse (plus hard/optical drives.) and installed the drivers for the graphics card. These then correctly installed for the first time with this board and the graphics card came up. I also installed all the latest motherboard drivers, tested the graphics card by running a few 3dmark05 runs.

Then inserted the audio card. For whatever reason it wasn't happy in PCI Slot 2, so I had to shift it to PCI Slot 1. Which is bizarre because that is back to front to usual logic.

Reinstall the drivers for the audio card in the new slot, booted again to complete that install then ran the diagnostic tools for the audio card. Ran a few tests to verify it was all okay.

Rinse, lather and repeat for card three - the Dxr3. Now it all seems to be going.

Damned if I can explain *why* that worked. The only explanation I can offer is that some sites I dredged up via google on the subject of ACPI seems to imply that install order is important to ACPI, presumably the OS has to be built up in the right layers for it to correctly allocate resources.

In some ways I think I prefered the more manual IRQ allocation days where you knew what was going on...