New Graphics Card - Comp won't boot!!

Hiya,

I recently purchased an Evesham ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, and installed it with no problems. (i previously had a geforce 4 mmx 440) The first time I booted up the computer, the standard window drivers or software rendering was a little crap, but the stuff was legible. I then downloaded the latest catalyst drivers, following the links at www.ati.com. However when I installed the drivers my computer will now not boot. I have Windows XP (Home) and only rarely can I get past the log on screen without everything freezing. I tried going into safemode which also crashes. Has anyone else got any tips or ideas which I can try - I am rather desperate, also I am not the world's greatest computer genious, so if you could please describe in detail - that would help, thanks

My System Spec is:

OS: Windows XP Home Edition
Athlon XP 2400+ (2.0Ghz)
MSI KT4AV Motherboard (AGP 8x)
768mb DDR SDRAM
ATI Radeon 9800 pro
80 gig drive (40gigs free)
terratec sixpack 5.1+ soundcard

i think thats everything but if you need clarification on anything please just say - thanks again!

Rob Cadwell

I've heard about some problems with ati card, especially the 9800 not , liking the m/b. Try setting it to 4x agp in the bios with fast write enable. Then update your bios.
Hope that helps

Hiya thanks for the reply. I'm not too confident with BIOS settings to be honest... So any chance of going into more detail? At the moment the AGP mode is set to Auto, and is greyed, out so you cannot edit it... do you know any alternate drivers I can try loading? just so that windows is workable?? And if anyone else has any ideas please please reply!! Thanks again

I checked out the ATI website, which was rather useless for what I wanted, but it did recommend getting latest motherboard drivers, BIOS updates and DX9, so I'm gonna try that, then I may try fiddling the BIOS settings but as I said I really don't have a clue!

Ah, I'm getting really sick of this 640x480 in 8bit colour! ARRGH!

Once remove the driver in safemode, and get the resolution back to VGA, theme windows classic. adujust for best perfomance.

Then update your Directx latest, confirm if it is active in directx diag from tools menu of System Information.

Try install again, and get the setting back step by step.

Well problem I have is that even Safe Mode manages to crash with that card, so at the moment I am back to using good ol' Geforce 4 MMX 440, and im downloading latest DX9 etc and then i'm going to try it, are there any other downloads that are critical?

I just downloaded the manual from msi. I suggest you do the same. To update the bios, msi have a utility called Live Moniter that when installed will check your bios and drivers and if out of date it will download them for you.
Quick thought, did you remove the nvidia driver first before installing the radeon driver? As megumi says, i'd remove the driver and update directx as well as getting the latest bios. If all esle fails, try changing the agp speed to 4x. It won't give much of a performance decrease. To do that, enter the setup utility. Go to Advanced Chipset Features, then Agp Timing control and change the agp mode to 4x. Page 60 of the pdf manual.
This should solve your problem.

Brilliant thanks guys - I'm gonna try everything you said, that live monitor thing certainly sounds good, and hopefully I won't be back here! Thanks again Cheers