Serios problem with G400 MAX!

[Scout255]

last night i grabbed the new drivers and tried to install them.
I ran the program and overrote the origenal settings in the drivers. At the endof the program it said that there was an error and my grafic card may notwork correctly. I rebooted and windows 2000 greeted me with a standard 640X480@60hz w/ 16 colors screen. I went to display properties only to find that it said "unknown monitor on Matrox G400 MAX AGP"
PDesk doesn't run when i start up, and any added tabs in advanced setup aren't there.
Just about this point, i rembembered i just installed the new drivers over the previous ones (WHQL approved ones....). So i went into control panel and removed the drivers through add/remove programs.
I rebooted and Win 2000 detected a new device (standard VGA card) i pointed it back to the new drivers and it said "error, cannot find file, your video card may not run correcly"
so i reboot again only to see the exact same screen again. I thought that perhapse i downloaded a correupted file, so i re-downloaded them off of matrox and tried to install them again.
The exact same thing happened and i finally gave up on ever getting these drivers to work. I then decided to reinstall the old microsoft approveddrivers. I redownloaded them and ran the install program only toget the exact same problem (file not found, may not work properly,please reboot)
irebooted and the exact same thing happened!
back to 640X480@ 16 colors.
Also, something is seriously wrongwith my MAX it seemed. I just got my referbished unit via matrox and strange funky things are happening with it (screen jitter, moves over 4 pixels, moves back 9-10, goes back the other way a few, and quite a few screen flashes) do you think this could be related? Prior to this, my computer was running peachy, save for whati mentioned above, which only happened every few hours.
ANY help would be great!
Thx for your time
SYSTEMSPECS:
Dual 400's on BP6 (AGP 2X)
256 meg pc-133 ram
quantum LM HD (ATA/66)
NEC 1 gig HD (IDE 2)
40X cdrom (IDE 1)
SB LIVE! value
G400 MAX 32 meg
3comNIC(10 base t)
windows 2000 pro
there are no devices shareing an IRQ with theG400 and ASPI is enabled.

[ayoub_ibrahim]

I believe that you need to totally uninstall your drivers with the matrox uninstaller pd_unin.exe(25 oct 2000) before updating the drivers.

[Jorden]

Any help? Yes, any help please, for Holly has got the same problem with her MAX.

She's now running with an old S3 Trio V64+, because neither the AGP slot and slot1 are recognized.

No OC'ing, nothing.
Going back to older drivers and older BIOS doesn't help. Using either the uninstall from under Add/Remove Programs or the uninstaller from the 25th of October doesn't help.
Win2k Pro gives a nice blue screen, and Win ME just refused to load...

She'll be posting her story later on herself (she's got her better way with words ), but any help up front would be useful.

Btw, my G400 vanilla works perfectly with the new drivers.

Jord.

[This message has been edited by Jorden (edited 09 November 2000).]

[dZeus]

I've had _exactly_ the same problem when I tried to revert back to the 5.14 drivers... and 5.20 was a no-go too after that.

I blamed it on PowerStrip, and did a completely new Win2k install (now everything works fine again). The difference is that I did a proper uninstall before installing the 5.20 drivers... Maybe there were some leftovers that caused this problem that were not removed when running the uninstall, or otherwise the 5.20 uninstallation procedure causes problems when trying to install other drivers. I won't test this last theory, at least not until the next series of drivers are released

[HollyBerri]

Well, Scout, you have my sympathies, but at least you can load Windows, which is more than I could do with the new drivers....

Here's the story (if this helps anyone figure it out).

For a change, I uninstalled the PD software before installing the new drivers on WinME. It seemed fine... but when I rebooted, the Win logon was corrupted and unuseable. So I went to SafeMode and removed the software, consigning myself back to a Standard VGA card at 640*480 and 16 colors.

That would have been all right... except now <u>no</u> drivers could be installed for the MAX... Windows would not load if any version of PD was installed. I upgraded the MAX's BIOS from 1.6-25 to 1.9-33, but that didn't help either.

Fortunately, I had a dual-boot with Win98. I couldn't load the new drivers there, either, but I could revert to PD 5.52. At this point, I'm thinking that it's a WinME problem, since I'd heard that many people had problems when they installed it over Win98 (which I had done). So I did a clean install of Win2K Pro, intending to do a clean install of WinME later and dual boot. FYI, both installs found a VGA card, not a G400.... not really a good sign.

Well, to make a long story short, the drivers still did not work, either under the Win2K or the WinME install.

Then I started mucking about with the motherboard BIOS. Here's what I tried:

• Changing the aperature size from 64 to 128 to 256;
• turning palette snoop on and off;
• turning off the HDD S.M.A.R.T. function of the motherboard;
• clocking down from a 75Mhz bus back to 66Mhz (like that was really the problem... yeah, right).

So now all I can think is, "It's gotta be the hardware". How that could be, I don't know, but what's left? So I reseat the MAX, no change. Finally I dig out this stupid S3 card, remove the MAX, and plop the PCI card in slot #1. Hmmm... POST is quiet, gives me no "no video signal" beeps...but the monitor is not displaying anything. All right... put the S3 in slot #3... it works fine, is discovered and installed by all versions of Windows perfectly.

I was going to post a thread called "It's gotta be the slots, right?"... but now I wonder, given Scout's problem.

What do you guys think?

Specs:
Asus P2B-F
Celeron 333@333
128 MB
vidcard on IRQ11
netcard on IRQ10
soundcard on IRQ9 and 5 for SB emu
no IRQ conflicts, no hw problems, no programs installed at the moment
Dual boot WinME and Win2K Pro

---------------------------------------
Holly

[dZeus]

Althought this sounds not entirely as my or Scout's problem, I would recommend the following:

Load your OS at non-overclocked speed. Do a new G400 BIOS-reflash, and then do a clean re-install of Windows and load the latest drivers.

Well, that was what I did, and it worked... but I am not sure if it works for you, because my problem was slightly different.

Good luck solving the problem,
Frank

[HollyBerri]

Thanks, Frank... that does sound like a good plan, but may I just say...

<font size=5><center>EEEEP!!!</font></center>

Since I'm just now reinstalling all my software on Win 2K, and must do it again for WinME, you can see how doing one or two <u>NEW</u> "clean installs" would not be on the top of my list of things to do for the next several days....Not your fault, of course .

Seriously, do you *really* think that "overclocking" to 75Mhz could be a problem? It only puts the PCI bus at 37.5 from the standard 33.4. It can hardly even be called overclocking!

Feel free to correct me if I'm being naive, but I just can't see it.

-------------------------------------------
Holly

[ayoub_ibrahim]

quoted from HollyBerri :"Seriously, do you *really* think that "overclocking" to 75Mhz could be a problem? It only puts the PCI bus at 37.5 from the standard 33.4. It can hardly even be called overclocking".
I'm sceptical that that should make a difference as well!
just my 2 cents

[Scout255]

I'm ready to give up. I've tried EVERYTHING save a full reformat (which isn't an option) to fix this! What the heck could the matrox drivers could have done to windows 2000 that would have nerfed my system so much?
is there any idea how i could fix this without a full reformat?

[DosFreak]

Forgive me if this has already been stated but have you assigned an IRQ to your video card in the bios?

------------------
C:\DOS
C:\DOS\RUN
\RUN\DOS\RUN

[Alec]

I don´t nkow if someone has already referred this, but in Add/Remove Programs, Matrox Sotware uninstall uses the same executable (which is the Windows/System folder) than that of the Driver uninstaller. Compare them and you´l notice that the unistaller that comes in the drivers is even more recent.
Good to know that Matrox solved that damned problem of having to uninstall drivers with an external program.

[Jorden]

have you assigned an IRQ to your video card in the bios?

What if you don't have that option in the BIOS? As far as I can see it's a hardware problem, but can the Matrox drivers have overwritten something somewhere that the AGP slot and the 1st PCI Slot in Holly's PC don't work anymore?

As it's a P2B-F, would there be any drivers for the mobo for it? It's an Intel chipset, so I don't think so, but maybe I'm wrong.

Jord.

[Scout255]

Yes, it has an IRQ. Its on #10 w/ no other devices on it......
this is so strange how a driver set could destroy every way to reinstall old drivers.

[The PIT]

I don't know whether this is an co-incidence but since I've installed the drivers on booting from cold I'm getting an sync error. No bleeps or anything and the machine is booting a reset cures the problem. So it's either because I'm overclocking or the card or monitor or going up the spout. I'll keep an eye on the situ and possibly borrow a monitor from work.

[Scout255]

yea! i fixed it!
download the recover.zip from the utilities secon on matroxes site, and boot up with the disk it creates.
it will fix all your problems.
it seems that your bios can get corrupted when you install the new drivers.