xp wont recognize nvidia drivers

[tuvold]

i really could use some help here. this is my brothers machine.

system specs:
asus p4pe
p4 2.4 northwood
asus 5200 series video disk
40 gb maxtor
2 gig corsair ram
lite on cd r/w burner
antec case with 430 true watt ps
onboard lan and sound
xp home ed. w/ sp1
directx 8.1

put this together in may of 04. it worked great with no problems at all. was used primarily as a gaming machine for one game only, dark age of camelot.

ok a couple of weeks ago DOAC has a new patch and my bro down loads it and installs it. after install games comes up with an error (render creation failure). so we search the vn boards and find out that the patch requires directx 9.0c. so we loaded up a game that had dx 9.0c and it was installed.
everythings good game wise so he take his comp home and plays it.

after a coupla days his comp keeps freezing up and has to be rebooted. it would work ok sometimes but occasionally freeze up while he was playing. finally it won't boot at all so his wife calls geek squad and they tell her the hard drive is bad. so he calls me asks me to put in a HD for him.


round 2:

he brings comp over and i try to power it up. it goes thru post and starts to load windows. at black part of windows load bang a quick blue flash on the screen ( BSOD?) too fast to read the message and the system reboots to post and starts again with the safe mode screen.

ok hes got corrupted files or a bad hard drive or something. I disconnect his HD and put a spare wd 60 gig hd in his machine using the same molex and ribbon cable, boot up and load his xp disk into drive and away we go.

everything seems to work fine. windows gets through loading and and everything looks good until it asks for a video driver disk. i loaded the disk that came with his video card (worked in the original setup) and got a warning, drivers not windows certified. hmmm didnt get that warning the first time. but i figure maybe i did and just forgot and load em any way. installed about halfway then locked up. so i rebooted it and it came up and booted it in safe mode with networking. it comes up and i go to nvidia and down load the latest whql drivers.

everything is still in safe mode. so i tried installing the new whql drivers and it starts to install but gives me a (where are these drivers type message). should be in the new driver download or in the windows dlls right?

so i'm stumped cant load the old drivers, cant load the the down loaded supposably certified drivers. pretty frustrated by this time. so my bro decides to buy a new vid card hoping the new card will have good drivers on it and everything will be fine. he heads to best buy.

round 3:

well he's gone so i'm just nosing around trying to figure out what's up. i figured that i had a little time before he gets back so woould try to recover info off of his supposed bad disk. i powered down, hooked it up to ribbon cable, set all jumpers and booted. BIOS recognised both disks and starts to boot normally. when it asked me for new video drivers i cancelled it out and ran off default xp drivers. ok everything seems to work except video. sounds good net is working just need video drivers.

click on my computer and it shows both hd's and cd. click on his old drive and bang it shows every thing. looks like a good disk, can read and copy to it and copy from it. ran chdsk from prompt and came up with no errors.

so my bro get back with new video card. bfg 6200 256meg ram compatable with his mother board. so new vid installed. windows comes up and prompts for new drivers and i load disk that came with card. guess what? it comes up with drivers not cert message.

so wtf i load them any way. seems to install correctly and restarts at prompt. windows restarts and when it comes up it says new hardware found and i select let windows look for them automatically. then it tells me there are no drivers found for the hard ware and defaults to xp drivers. by this time i am totally at a loss.

well maybe the problem is it needs SP2. cant hurt right gonna need it anyway right. so went to windows update and down load sp2. everything looks good installs ok and restarts at the prompt.
at black part of windows load bang a quick blue flash on the screen ( BSOD?) too fast to read the message and the system reboots to post and starts again with the safe mode screen.

ok i'm whipped. anyone out there can help me?


if this is in the wrong forums can the mods move it for me?

 

[stang8118]

Have you tried another video card? Try memtest and see if possibly a stick of ram went bad on him.

 

[tuvold]

new vid card

thanks for the reply:

tried the 2 different video cards as per my first post.

reformatted the HD and did everything again. as before everything worked until the drivers were tried.

am running prime 95 full torture test (bout 1/2 hour so far) and toast at the same time. everything looks good and the temps are only up to about 115 f.

have downloaded western digitals hd diags. and will run them soon.

will update as i can.

thanks again

gotta update my sig its 2 years old lol

 

[stang8118]

I would still give memtest a try, Prime won't pick up all memory errors like memtest can.

 

[tuvold]

memtest

ok will do.

after 30 mins of prime95 and toast no errors. am running disk diags now but everything seems to be ok. after last test stops will down load mem test. dont you have to have a floppy for that?

also noticed that while using default vid drivers can display at 10 by 7 instead of just 8 by 6.


also edited sig, lol

 

[tuvold]

mem test

ok mem test went thru 1 cycle at no errors.

all the hard ware tests that i've been able to find seem to work ok.

only thing to try different is use my xp disk to elimate his windows disk being broke somehow.

 

[tuvold]

fixed

ok good news.

my bro came over after work last night. after 2 days of testing it was still not fixed. i explained everything i had done and told him that i just could not figure out why it worked when i put it together last time and with everything being the same it wouldn't work this time.

then he tells me "o btw its not the same. i added a stick of ram to it bout three months ago".

well heck. so i pull out the stick of ram he added and it booted normally. after swapping sticks around and re-testing everything it turns out that dimm slot 2 is flaky. ????? dont know why memtest didnt get any errors but when ever memory is in that slot everything works but it will not load the drivers for graphics cards.

put it all back together with ram in slots 1 and 3, ran memtest again for 20 mins then loaded prime95 and went to bed. when i got up prime had run for 7 hours w/ no errors.

loaded it all back on, packed it up and its waiting for him to pick up.

was definitely a learning experience and added much to my homegrown troubleshooting technique.

THANKS MUCH to STANG8118 for getting me headed in the right direction.


tuvold