Legit Reviews

Alright, yesterday I installed a new power supply (Silencer 410 Dell-2) in my Dell Dimension 8300 as well as a Radeon X800 Pro. Everything went fine, booted and got into windows, but noticed I needed to change some settings and/or get the drivers - only problem is, when I do that and reboot (or change even the slightest display setting) the screen goes black and appears basically to lose signal entirely.

I have spent the past two days working through countless restarts to try and fix or circumvent the problem - I have opted for the official drivers from ATI, let Windows detect one, and neither works - I have also uninstalled the old drivers (for the GEforce 5200). I have also tried to update the BIOS (as per their suggestions), update the microsoft .net framework to 2.0 and now 3.0, and still get absolutely nothing but a black screen when I enter windows after boot up - I have to manually shut down and reboot in safe mode to sys restore just so I can get back into windows and acutally be able to see. Any thoughts or ideas? I am completely stuck here and quite frustrated, everything worked so well at the outset but I should've known it would never be that easy. As far as I can tell my system should be able to handle this card (1 gig of RAM, Pentium 4, now a better power supply) but maybe I'm just screwed.

Cheers in advance to anyone who offers any help, I'll be much obliged.

Uninstall the graphics drivers again, and run "driver cleaner pro" in safemode.

Set it to clean all nvidia and ATI drivers. Reboot into regular windows, and download the catalyst drivers again, and install them. Reboot however many times it needs to all install properly, and see if that's helped.

Dan

Followed the directions and ended up with the same result - I gave the Computer 3 restarts (hard/manual shutdown/restarts - was my only real choice) and waited until the hard drive finished mucking about (I'm going purely on sound here as I couldn't see anything). On go-round #4 I went into safe mode and ran the drive cleaner pro again just so I could get back into windows and be able to see again. =\

Edit: got a system message saying "No ATI graphics driver is installed, or the ATI driver is not functioning properly. Please install the ATI driver appropriate for your ATI hardware." Obviously the clean-out worked, where should I go from here?

One of my buddies just had a similar problem. It was with a ati 4850 and a hp monitor. After he would install the drivers everything would go black. Boot into safe mode and it seemed to work. Exchanged Cards for another 4850 and the same result. It ended up being the monitor wouldn't handle the resolution or frequency the drivers were setting the card to output. He plugged into a viewsonic vx724 and it worked. Went out and bought a Samsung monitor and it worked. If you can try a dif monitor.

hmm, interesting, but I doubt I'll be able to find a new monitor (don't really have the $ lying around to do it) - it does make some sense though since right after the black windows load screen the monitor goes black and the light in the bottom right goes orange (instead of green - Dell flatscreen monitor here). It's like any sort of attempt to make the resolution higher or go above 8 colors makes the screen give up or something, guess maybe I am screwed.

Do you have the monitor plugged in as DVI or VGA , I had the same problem with the monitor plugged in with DVI plugged it in VGA everything worked perfect but it was on a 4850 card but might be worth a try.

If you have a friend who has a dif monitor see if you can borrow that. Another option would be to see if you can find a working crt on a site like craigslist.com. Peeps are usually getting rid of crt's for 15-30 bucks. One thing I wanted to try with my buddies set up is a dual monitor and set the main manually after the driver install, but he sent it back b4 I could get over there.

Awesome, in my continued luck with computers, the forums here decided to eat my whole message, save for the quote.

AMD_Freak wrote:Do you have the monitor plugged in as DVI or VGA , I had the same problem with the monitor plugged in with DVI plugged it in VGA everything worked perfect but it was on a 4850 card but might be worth a try.

How do I determine this? I have both cables plugged from the card to the screen, so would I just remove the DGI cable and leave the other one?

Also, just a quick update: Well, 30 hours later I have returned to my original setup out of pure frustration as I made no headway with any of the problems (despite at least 20 hours of work put in during that stretch). I attempted everything from a BIOS upgrade to the Windows detected drivers to the ATI official drivers, using Drive Cleaner Pro, and going through dozens of restarts and treks through safe mode and sys restore, and all for nothing - every time I attempted to change any settings or install a driver for the Radeon X800 Pro, I lose my screen right as windows is loading.

Just for stability's sake, I finally decided to stick with my old video card for the time being, but after cracking the case and making the switch, the new power supply started acting up and now doesn't work worth a damn either (with no loose leads or anything that I could find through 5 or so checks and restarts). So now I'm completely back to original equipment with nothing to show, and I am, as you can imagine, thrilled.

The one upside (I guess) is that I am sitting here with the Catalyst control center open (and it's mad - it wants its ATI card back), but I'm not terribly sure I want to try and go back in to replace all of the hardware again on the slim chance that I might make it into windows and be able to mess with it. I unfortunately just can't devote endless hours and days to this.

SouthernSteel wrote: How do I determine this? I have both cables plugged from the card to the screen, so would I just remove the DGI cable and leave the other one?

Well ...you don't need 2 cables to hook up your monitor as far as I knew unless you're running more than 1 monitor..either the DVI(usually white) or VGA(blue) cable is fine..personally if you had it hooked like that the whole time, I would try the DVI first if that don't work still try the VGA on..I doubt it would be the issue but ya never know and will not hurt to try at this point

Alright I may give that a shot - I just did a quick switch back to the new hardware (bigger Power supply and the radeon X800). Currently everything looks good (resolution is fine, 1024 by 768, 32 colors) but I cannot run the Catalyst control center - I got the initial warning message about needing the drivers for the card, but at this point I'm scared to mess with anything and risk it all going to hell again.

Ran the hardware wizard, it found an Intel 82875(P) Processor to I/O memory interface 257E and not the card this time, seems it has already recognized it being in, but hasn't recommended any drivers or anything, so who knows.

Thoughts?

Edit: Hardware Device Manager says: "Windows cannot start this hardware device because its configuration information (in the registry) is incomplete or damaged. (Code 19)" It wants me to run the troubleshooter, but again, I'm hesitant.

Edit2: I have not uninstalled the NVidia drivers from last night when I replaced that card. Also, on a quick test of the card, I tried to run Medieval II but it immediately gets an unspecified error and exits - something which is no doubt related to all this nonsense.

Figured to go ahead and make a sys restore point now as well so that I least I have that peace of mind as I will no doubt start mucking with the drivers and whatnot again shortly.

Edit3: Mucking has begun, with predictable kill upon entering windows, still messing with it. Should I just give up and try to get an original install CD?

Having Nvidia drivers and ATI drivers on the same machine will only be making things worse, which is why I suggested originally to clean out everything with the driver cleaner program originally.

Now you said that you had two cables from the card to the monitor earlier. If you had this the whole time it was blacking out, did you try swapping between inputs on the monitor?

Dan

DMB2000uk wrote:Having Nvidia drivers and ATI drivers on the same machine will only be making things worse, which is why I suggested originally to clean out everything with the driver cleaner program originally.

Now you said that you had two cables from the card to the monitor earlier. If you had this the whole time it was blacking out, did you try swapping between inputs on the monitor?

Dan

I followed you on that, the only reason I have gone back to the Nvidia one was from reinstalling the old card out of frustration with this whole project and how poorly it was going. In any case, I always make sure to clean them all out each time I give this a shot.

I take it the thing with the two monitor cables then would be to install the driver, then reboot trying the one, and if that doesn't work, do it with the other? Or can I just try unplugging/replugging them in while I sit with my lovely black screen?

I know you followed it the first time, but was saying it again so you can clean out either the ATI or Nvidia ones again now (whichever one you aren't using).

Use one cable at a time, and if it is going black on the one cable, try using the other one and see if that works.

I don't know if you've tried this yet, but when the computer is booting, tap F8 until you get the boot menu, you should have an option there that has "Enable VGA Mode". This will start up windows with a low resolution mode, and if it works, you can try setting different ones in the OS to see what you can actually use with your monitor.

Another thing to try is when you manage to get into windows (with or without drivers) is go into device manager and actually uninstall your monitor (in the displays section) and then let it re-detect it when the drivers have been installed.

Dan

Alright I will keep those in mind.

Here's what I just did that actually seems to have worked (I'm not holding my breath yet though). I found and used the Omega Drivers (just to try something different), and once I was in windows with the nice ol' black screen I unplugged the White cable (which is DVI I think) and the screen came up, no problem - I was going to try the swap then as well, but when I plugged it back in (with both now plugged in), the screen stayed on.

As to what the hell that means, I'm not entirely sure, but I have good resolution (which I knocked back to 1024X768, hopefully that's not too criminal, think my eyes are going bad from all this lol). Will mess around with it and test it via games and restarts and report back shortly.

If you had both plugged in when it started up the PC, then are you sure that it's not starting out on the DVI cable (and DVI input on the monitor), but when the drivers load it's swapping over to the VGA (for whatever reason), but the monitor is still trying to look for a signal on the DVI cable? Once the cable is disconnected it knows there's nothing there so then switches to the VGA input, and will stay on that even if you plug the DVI back in (as there is still signal on the VGA).

Dan

Alright, well I have to say cheers to all of you for the help - so far I have run checks on a bunch of things, and all seems to be fine, I can run higher settings on games and I have restarted windows a couple of times just to be sure, and everything seems to be steady and holding. Just goes to prove that even someone dumb like me can go out and read up and get good help to fix otherwise awfully frustrating comp problems.

What did fix it?