G400 dead on boot, wakes up in windows?

[MikkoJ]

I've had a working setup of G40032MBDH@150/200 for months, primary monitor Nokia 447Xavc 1280*1024*32bpp@85Hz, secondary monitor Nokia 447K 1024*768*32bpp@85Hz. Yesterday after a reset because of a hanged nfs5 demo I got this strange thing.
In boot, the primary monitor is dead ("check signal cable"), you can hear the system booting up, and when it's time for the windows resolution (1280*1024) the display comes alive and everything seems to be normal. So only the normal DOS-mode display at startup does not function anymore. I can't check any bios settings because I can't see the bios screen
Same thing after a cold boot, power off, power cord off. I can't imagine what this is about?!

mikko

[waxling]

How about telling us about your system?

Mainly your processor speed/fsb?....especially at the time of the 'reboot' (agp divider as well)

Also your mobo type etc and irq table.
The last bit isn't a huge thing but it might help.

Another thing is, you were obviously overclocking your video card, did you save this in PINS, or did you use an overclocking prog?

[mdhome]

Hello MikkoJ
My nephew had the same problem about 3 months ago after he tried flashing the card's BIOS from within win98. Unfortunately it didnt work and the application hung.
He was able to resolve the problem by running one of the Matrox utils (found on the Matrox site) that reset his cards BIOS back to factory mode.

regards Michael

[MikkoJ]

Abit BH6rev1.0, Cel300@464, 128MB PC-100, G400, RR-G, DVRaptor, SBLive!, 56KPCI, 2*IDE HD, HP8210i. 102FSB, AGP1/1. G400 alone at IRQ9, no IRQ sharings, Overclocking via MGATweak. As I said, system has been stable for months like this. After a reboot, dos mode is gone. If I try to open a DOS window at Windows, system hangs.
I downloaded the bios recovery utility, now my problem is that my mobo is not booting from a: and I can't change that setting in bios as I can't see anything on the bios setup screen! I'll try to find the right setting blindfolded though.
I'll have to try to reprogram the bios in a different machine. This sucks. I hope the bios thing helps, can't think of anything else either.
At least the card doesn't seem to be totally broken as I can type this in from Windows.

mikko

[Rags]

First of all, you are running your AGP bus wayyyy out of spec, change your divider to 2/3. You may have damaged your card by doing this, but download the bios recovery utility from Matrox and run it...without overclocking your AGP bus.

Rags

[Kruzin]

After setting your AGP to spec (2/3), you can take care of the bios by doing this (hopefully you have a PCI video card you can use).

Remove the G400.
Install the PCI card (not the windows drivers...this is all done at the DOS prompt), and connect monitor.
Boot into your mobo BIOS, and set the video boot order to PCI first.
Install the G400, leaving the monitor hooked to the PCI card.
Boot to a DOS prompt, and run the BIOS recovery util.
Remove the PCI card, hook the monitor to the G400, set the BIOS video order back to AGP first.

Hopefully that will do it...

[This message has been edited by Kruzin (edited 07 April 2000).]

[MikkoJ]

Thanks Kruzin, that did do it.

Now the card seems to work okay again.

thank you all.

mikko