Radeon Issue...

[rsfnatik]

Bizarre stuff happening here...

Athlon 1Ghz/512MB/KT133A/ATI R9500Pro/Win2kSP4.

This machine has been running along quite stable for some time.

I booted up when I can home today and saw some quick message regarding the ATI system tray icon and some .lnk file. I didn't pay much attention and continued to check email, eBay and other stuff. I then fired up Halo but couldn't join any games... it just jumped back to windows with an "exception" whenever a map tried to load. Odd... I then recalled setting h/w acceleration to a minimum when I was doing some DV capturing a few days ago. I bumped it back up and Halo successfully loaded *one* map but gameplay was slow as a dog and rendering incorrectly. I not positive that adjusting h/w accleration actually did anything, but i'll note it. At that point I figured I would just reinstall/update the video drivers - wrong move.

At this point, regardless of what driver version I attempt to install I have the same results. The OS boots to the login prompt and all is well. As soon as I hit CTRL+ALT+DEL to log in the display becomes corrupt - black screen with what appears to be a sliver of the login window. A few moments later the monitor clicks off as if it's no longer receiving a signal. I can boot into safe mode just fine.

I was able to login once with an ATI driver installed but that was only after the first reboot after installing an older version of the driver. As soon as I logged in tho I was presented with a error window regarding ATI's VPU recovery thing...

I've used ATI's Catalyst removal utility to remove any ATI s/w. On the next reboot the VGA card is detected. I cancel this and have tried installing drivers v4.12, v4.11 and back to v3.10 - they all do the same. I've also reinstalled VIA's 4-in-1 drivers for the KT133A.

Suggestions? I'll do a few passes with memtest and we'll see what I get there.

[CompGeek01]

Try using DriverCleaner

http://www.drivercleaner.net/

Just follow the instructions. Worth a shot. Weird though. :t

[rsfnatik]

I tried Driver Cleaner and it didn't help... same problem. Thanks tho.

I pulled the card and used some compressed air to clean out slot and fan. I went into the BIOS and set some more reserved AGP settings. After several boots I was able to isolate the problem to "fast writes", at least with v4.11 of the ATI drivers. Odd, the version I had previously installed had no issue with fast writes. Even ATI's SmartGART utility indicates fast writes is not a "safe" config.

Anyway, we'll see how it goes...

[CompGeek01]

Weird, although I have seen performance improvments with Fast Writes off...nothing that drastic. Keep us (or just me lol) informed if that does solve the problem.

:t

[rsfnatik]

The problem appears to be solved. I'm still not sure what started this all off tho... there have been absolutely no h/w or s/w installed recently and I have Enterprise level AV running on this machine. Odd...

I did do a bit of reading on AGP Fast Writes appears to cause more stability problems then any good. What's odd is that it was enabled with the earlier driver installed...

[Mad Al]

Have had similiar problems on a similiar machine to yours and ended up turning off the graphic driver's use of the AGP in SmartGart. Think I will now try turning off the Fast Writes as you have done.

Thanks for the tip.

Alan

[RockNRoll]

Did you at one point turn off your PC improperly and keep skipping scan disk on bootup?

[Mad Al]

Well I downloaded Cat 4.12, installed turned off fast writes and still was back to where I was. (Rad 9700 Pro running as a PCI card).