98SE problem after problem...

brothermerry · #1 January 9th, 2003, 09:24 AM

a couple of days ago i posted here about lost files when setting up a new hard drive. i sorted that one out, but after i formatted the drive and installed 98SE, i've begun to experience an all new kind of pain.

i've been working on it for 2 days and i've formatted twice and reinstalled 98SE 4 times. i think i've worked out what the problem could be though. i have a winfast A250 LE Geforce 4 128mb ti4200 graphics card and a soundblaster audigy soundcard. these both worked fine until i formatted the computer. however, when i installed their drivers after installing 98, i've had a billion errors on startup or soon after. i'm pretty sure it's the gfx card that's the problem because they seem to be gfx related errors. sometimes after i install the drivers, there is a completely blue screen during startup with just a little grey box in the center. then when i restart and make it into windows, i find the resolution is on the lowest setting with 16 colors. i can change these but it wants to restart to make the changes (never did this before as i had "apply new color settings without restarting" checked the first time i changed them) and when it does restart, nothing has changed.
i'm all the time uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers and there seems to be a new problem everytime. sometimes it freezes on a black screen with a flashing cursor in the top left corner, sometimes i get a black screen with some oddly colored bars on the top and sometimes (but more rarely) i get a blue screen of death. when i restart after these i often find an error message waiting to the effect of "these settings are not compatible with your display adapter" or something like that. other times, i open the display settings to change them and when i click the settings tab, a .dll with run and 32 in it's name has an illegal operation.
now, i have the latest drivers for the card but that seems to have little effect.

as i only have those three things installed (that's windows 98SE, the soundcard drivers and the winfast drivers) i'm sure it must be a problem with one of those. can anybody help me?

brothermerry · #2 January 9th, 2003, 11:16 AM

btw, my gigabyte motherboard has onboard sound, if that might make a difference. i lost the cd with those drivers on them so couldn't reinstall them. could that be the problem?

dickster · #3 January 9th, 2003, 01:36 PM

One problem might be not disabling the onboard sound in bios. This should be disabled when using a sound card.

Also, if your motherboard has onboard video, you need to disable it in bios. That would cause errors.

brothermerry · #4 January 9th, 2003, 04:15 PM

i just tried disabling the onboard sound through the bios but to no avail. however, i have closed in on the problem and i'm sure it's a graphics driver/card problem. i've now installed all my drivers except the winfast one and stuff hasn't crashed. now all i need do is fix the gfx problem. i have the latest drivers and all that jazz, so i don't think that's it. i've even installed two different versions to see if that helped. no dice. does anyone have any suggestions?

tb525 · #5 January 9th, 2003, 04:33 PM

Check which version of DirectX you have installed (Start > Run > type dxdiag > click OK)

You need DirectX 5 or above for that card.

brothermerry · #6 January 10th, 2003, 02:16 PM

the problem turned out to be something to do with the order in which i installed my junk. i found that if i didn't install the agp driver that came with the motherboard until after the winfast drivers, everything turned out ok. let's just hope i don't have anything more to post around here anytime soon

later guys.