5.14 driver woes

[Bursar]

I've just installed the 5.15 drivers, and my Win2k machine is now stuck in 640x480 and colours.

This is a bit of a pain to say the least.

I was previously running the 5.10 beta drivers, and just ran the Setup for 5.14 thinking everything would be alright.

The install seemed to go fine, but on boot up I'm stuck with VGA. My G400 MAX has an exclamation mark on it in Device Manager, and says it can't load all the drivers.

I have manually replaced all the files with the ones from the 5.14 release, but to no avail.

The only thing I can link it to is the fact that I did some registry hacking a couple of weeks ago and removed the bits that loaded PowerDesk on startup.

I may have made some other changes, but I don't recall.

If someone on Win2k can mail me their registry settings for a G400 MAX (or post them here), I'll check to see if there is an obvious problem.

In the meantime, any other help would be appreciated!

------------------

[Rags]

Just uninstall the drivers from your machine, then reinstall the drivers you had before. Then, yet again uninstall those from your machine. Run the setup for the latest drivers, tick both boxes that say "override previous settings...blah blah" during the setup, and you should be back in business.

Rags

[Bursar]

Thanks for the help, but it didn't work

The exclamation mark is still there, and i'm still stuck in 640x480.

When I run setup, I don't get asked if I want to overwrite previous settings. I guess this means that it has uninstalled everything.

If I remove the card from Win2k and reboot, it picks it up as a standard VGA card. Choosing the provided G400 drivers doesn't make any difference either.

Is it possible that something has just got fried in the card? Or would I just get no video signal at all if that were the case?

Any more suggestions would be appreciated.

[Rags]

Do previous drivers even work now?

[Bursar]

Unfortunately not.

I've tried 5.10, 5.11 and 5.14. They all seem to install fine, they just don't work when I reboot.

I'm completely at a loss. What I might do is take my card into work tomorrow and swap it with the one there.

I can then see if it's card or driver problem.

[Guru]

I had the same prob. It started working after I enabeld IRQ for VGA in my BIOS!

------------------
Join the MURC SETI team! | SETI @ MURC

[Chucky Cheese]

Bursar,

have you tried to reflash the bios of the matrox card from a dos boot disk? i'm not sure if it will help but it seems to be the only course of action.

they installed on my system without a hitch. i installed them over the 5.03 drivers.

Platform Configuration:

Motherboard: AMI MegaRUM II, dual 600Mhz Pentium III processors (installed), each with a 32/512 Cache configuration. 1 GB of PC100(CAS2), 8ns memory. Symbios Logic 53C896 U2W SCSI controllers. Intel 443GX Xeon chipset.

SCSI I/O:

Channel 1(LVD/U2): 4 Seagate LVD Cheetah 18LP, ST39103LW Ultra2 Wide SCSI-3 hard Drives, each with 1024k cache.

Channel 2(SE): JAZ 2GB internal, Plex-Writer 8/20, Pioneer DVD-303s ultra-scsi DVD reader and 2 UltraPlex-Wide 17/40 speed CD-ROM drives.

USB: USB Zip Drive, Epson Stylus Scan 2500, Intellimouse Explorer and 3com US Robotics 56K Voice Faxmodem Pro

Networking: The network adapter is a 3Com 3Cr990-TX-95 PCI 10/100 Mbps Ethernet controller.

Video: Matrox G400 Max with Dual Head. The primary display is a Panasonic PanaSync E21, .25-dot pitch, 20" viewable; the secondary display is a Samsung 17" Flat Panel Display(.264mm pitch) model 770TFT.

Multi-media: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live PCI Bus Mastering sound card. Speaker system is the Cambridge Works FPS2000 Digital speaker system.

cc

[mainframe]

HI Bursar,

go to control_panel's add/remove program and remove the drivers from there. Restart the system and you will be prompted to install drivers for the new hardware found (PCI VGA card), install the standard PCI VGA drivers (windows default drivers) and restart.
When system comes back up, you go ahead and run the setup for the drivers of your choice.

I have the win2k drivers running on my system just fine... (as far as installation and running dualhead goes. I haven't done any extensive tests on it or benchmarked its performance yet, though)

Hope it works out for you.

[Bursar]

I have taken my MAX into work, and put into a machine that had a vanilla G400 32MB Dual-Head.

The work machine is now exhibiting the same problems. I can only assume from that, that the card has developed some kind of fault.

Completely bizzare, but there you have it. Matrox seemed to have developed card killing drivers as well now!! <g>

[Chucky Cheese]

Bursar,

try this...

boot up in vga mode > go to the services icon in the administrative tools folder > locate "MGABGEXE" > double click it > set the start-up type to "disabled" > click apply/ok...reboot.

this is a bios gaurd utility, i think its' function is to prevent a program from corrupting the bios.

cc

[Bursar]

Yay!!

I reflashed the BIOS, and it seems to be working. I need to try it on my home machine, but signs at work are promising.

I think what may have caused the problem is that I ran the UBIOSWIN program, and tried to update the BIOS from Win2k.

This time I booted to DOS, and ran PROGBIOS -i with the name of the BIOS image.

Thanks for your help guys.

[ski]

Do you have a Creative Dxr3 card installed with the recent beta drivers if so uninstalled them thats what cause me the same problem.

------------------
Staff Memeber and SuperGeek of the Year at
<A HREF="http://www.3dpower.net
ski@3dpower.net" TARGET=_blank>www.3dpower.net
ski@3dpower.net</A>

[Bursar]

Damnit!!

It doesn't work when I get home. I can only assume that my Registry hacking has had more consequences than I originally thought.

I've removed the drivers, reinstalled the drivers, tried 5.10 and 5.14 again, and no luck.

I don't have a Dxr card installed (never have had).

Any suggestions (preferebly not in the realm of wipe it and start again) would be appreciated as I am rapidly losing patience with this thing.

Is there an IRC channel that any of you guys regularly hang out in? It'd be great if I could get some real time suggestions.

TIA

[Alec]

Try reflashing the card´s BIOS.

[Bursar]

It is definately working now.

I eventually put in an ATi card, and let Windows detect it.

After that, I put the G400 back, installed the 5.14 drivers, and i'm back up and running.

That's the last time I ever go messing with Matrox related registry keys!!