- Joined
- Jun 24, 2001
- Location
- in the garage
Wednesday afternoon, I go downstairs to take out my trash, and after coming back in, check my mail slot, and find a package slip. Go to the front desk, pick it up, and it says Guillemot on the outside! I know that this is my vanilla Prophet III, which I sent in to be RMAd after I chipped a capacitor off the back when I dropped my waterblock onto the back of it in an otherwise routine installation. I shouldnt' have been able to RMA it, because I had replaced the glue under the blorb and the memory sinks with arctic silver epoxy, something I couldn't just rub off.
I greedily unwrapped the packaging, and found a nicely padded brown box, perfectly fitting the size of a large graphics card. Pulling that open, I took out and opened the static bag, and reached in and took out the beautiful GeForce 3. I checked the RAM sinks quickly, and saw that it was a totally new card, because my silver wasn't on there. Not only that, but my eyes shifted to the top right hand corner of the card, only to notice the beautiful words: Ti 500 written in white. I was so happy! Getting a Ti500 instead of a normal GeForce 3 when I didn't even deserve to get the RMA!
I go to my system, and quickly remove the Kyro 2 drivers I had installed, powered down, ripped out the Kyro 2, and (after much struggling trying to move RAM and hard drives out of the way) put the Prophet III Ti500 in, cleared the CMOS, and powered up. After an achingly long 5 seconds, I heard a solitary and wonderful beep, and my monitor clicked on. Windows XP began it's startup, although I noticed there were faint lines running down the screen. Instead of booting to an attractive blue login screen, I got a black screen, with a plain white cursor in the middle. Waited...nothing. Rebooted, and it did the same thing. I decided I would go down the hall and say hi to some friends instead of sitting in front of my system, waiting for it to fix itself.
I returned half an hour later to find my screen black with the cursor, but after a few seconds my system rebooted itself. I realized that it had just been looping to the same problem each time. So next step, loaded into Safe Mode, and the beautiful blue was back! I checked the drivers, and the Ti500s were installed, but I went and found some other drivers, to check, and installed them. Rebooted, still black screen when I started up, and no notice from windows in the next reboot that anything had happened(ie: windows did not finish starting up in the last attempt...), just straight to black. Same problem with 4 other types of drivers.
Then decided to try regular GF3 drivers instead of Ti500 drivers, so I forced it to change to GF3 drivers, rebooted(from safe mode), and I actually got a login screen! I could log in, but I couldn't increase the resolution from 4 bit color.
Then it hit me, to try the Windows 2000 install I had on my C: (while running XP on my D:, funky drive choice problems, another long story from 2 weeks ago), and see if I could at least run that and salvage anything from my D: and then wipe it clean. However, when I tried to boot, it said that there were corrupted system files, and it needed to be repaired. Easy enough, just boot off the Win2k disk, it performed it's repairs, then let me into Win2k. This, however, was just a shell of the real Win2k...so much as running a program automatically froze the OS, and the only way to get out was to reboot.
Realizing that wasn't a better option than dealing with XP, at the moment, I rebooted and instead of choosing to boot to Win2k I just changed it to XP. Problem was, it did the same thing. So time to start tryign things in safe mode again, I guessed, but when I restarted, it showed me a report in DOS when trying to load, it was found that SYSTEM folder was corrupted, and Windows 2000 needed repairs! It had stopped recognizing the OS as XP!!
Now grasping the depth of this pile of $*%7 I had gotten myself into, I went into Win2k(retarded version), and checked if I could burn cds, but even though I just tried run Easy CD Creator, it froze up. Next I checked if I could at least open My Computer, which I could, and I could transfer files or folders across the drives. So I decided to make a folder named "backup" on my C: and put stuff I needed from my D: in there, then use my D: as my primary drive, after formatting it, and putting an OS on it. But when I tried to create a new folder, it froze. So I resorted to copying everything into my base C: directory, which worked. By then I was planning to simply format my D: and use that as a stepping stone, but couldn't format my drive because I had no win98 boot disks, nor could get the 'format' option to work in windows.
I asked a friend down the hall to do it for me, but he was a total ******* about it and said that I would have to pay him! So I called another friend up the street who had a bunch of computers, and he said that he could help me out, so I told him I'd let him know if I was going to come up that night(it was ~11 pm, by that time). Annoyed and drained, I decided to feel better by smoking up, which I did, and it helped, and went over to the girls down the hall to see what they were doing(watching a movie, it turned out), and ended up hanging with them for awhile. Anyway, eventually got to the friend's up the street, at 1:30, but we didn't manage to format the drive, because the only bootdisk he had wouldn't work, and the linux commands he was trying were giving him errors that the disk was too big(negative 279 megs, if you can believe it). I realized I could use my laptop to download a bootdisk, and so made out a whole list of things I needed to do just to be able to use a bootdisk to format my drive.
1.) Get floppy drive out of other computer
2.) Get floppy drive plugin for laptop
3.) Download bootdisk and put it on disk from laptop
4.) Install floppy drive in desktop
5.) Attempt to boot up and format drive
The next day, before I did that, I realized how hot the card had been getting, and decided to add some cooling. I had two normal sized heatsinks lying around, a FOP, and a low profile copper cooler. The FOP fit better, so I pasted it on the card, after removing the Blorb, with Arctic Silver Epoxy, and securing it with pieces of floss wrapped around the card. After probably playign with the card for too long, I installed it in the system. And booted up, to be greeted by a lovely single beep and BIOS options.
That list finally got done, around 5 this afternoon, then I attempted to run setup from the XP disk, which didn't work. So I went and borrowed a bootable Win98 CD from the previously mentioned 'guy down the hall'(who probably wishes to remain anonymous), got that, and started the installation up. When I did get there, it saw some files from my attempted XP install, and said that it needed to format the drive, so I let it. Got Win98 installed, ages later, and decided to go straight to XP, because someone had said a clean start and only installing the Microsoft Update fixed his 'Endless Loop' problem. As soon as I had installed the drivers, I boot into a black screen, with a white cursor. "No problem," I think to the GeForce, "I can just use Windows 2000, I didn't have problems with my GeForce 3 and Win2k, so there."
So I rebooted off the Win98 CD, reformatted, reinstalled, and after that, installed Win2k. By this time it was 1:30 AM, again. I booted up, Windows looked fine, and decided to install the 21.83 drivers, because they said "W2k" instead of "W2k/XP" like my others. Rebooted, to Win2k: retarded edition. Tried to boot into Win2k safe mode, to find an ugly greenish background, with a login box saying "Administrator" with a blank password box, which I couldn't reach, as the cursor would change to 'busy' as soon as I passed it over the login box.
By then, I had lost all hope, and decided I had been beaten, after those many many hours of battle. I restarted, changed the BIOS to Reset Configuration Data, for the installation of my Kyro 2, and powered down. I reached in to and grabbed the GF3 Ti500, pulled it out, only to find the FOP I had installed on the GPU earlier to be loose from the GPU, hanging onto the pieces of floss I had used(in addition to a 1/3 1/3 1/3 mixing of Arctic Epoxy) to keep in on. Problem is, I now realize, is that either the fact that the GPU had no heatsink, it was crashing(and had been previously with the Blorb because it had very little thermal paste beneath it). But then how did it not die? I would have thought the nVidia cores would fry as quickly as the athlon ones do. So maybe I just pulled the FOP loose when I took the card out, or it bumped against something in my case! Updates tomorrow or the next day, depending on my findings. For now, my FOP has a new layer of Epoxy on it with a sobe bottle balancing on it for pressure. Tomorrow I will (albeit briefly) test the 'loose heatsink' theory, and hopefully(although woefully) that will turn out to be the center of the problem.
I greedily unwrapped the packaging, and found a nicely padded brown box, perfectly fitting the size of a large graphics card. Pulling that open, I took out and opened the static bag, and reached in and took out the beautiful GeForce 3. I checked the RAM sinks quickly, and saw that it was a totally new card, because my silver wasn't on there. Not only that, but my eyes shifted to the top right hand corner of the card, only to notice the beautiful words: Ti 500 written in white. I was so happy! Getting a Ti500 instead of a normal GeForce 3 when I didn't even deserve to get the RMA!
I go to my system, and quickly remove the Kyro 2 drivers I had installed, powered down, ripped out the Kyro 2, and (after much struggling trying to move RAM and hard drives out of the way) put the Prophet III Ti500 in, cleared the CMOS, and powered up. After an achingly long 5 seconds, I heard a solitary and wonderful beep, and my monitor clicked on. Windows XP began it's startup, although I noticed there were faint lines running down the screen. Instead of booting to an attractive blue login screen, I got a black screen, with a plain white cursor in the middle. Waited...nothing. Rebooted, and it did the same thing. I decided I would go down the hall and say hi to some friends instead of sitting in front of my system, waiting for it to fix itself.
I returned half an hour later to find my screen black with the cursor, but after a few seconds my system rebooted itself. I realized that it had just been looping to the same problem each time. So next step, loaded into Safe Mode, and the beautiful blue was back! I checked the drivers, and the Ti500s were installed, but I went and found some other drivers, to check, and installed them. Rebooted, still black screen when I started up, and no notice from windows in the next reboot that anything had happened(ie: windows did not finish starting up in the last attempt...), just straight to black. Same problem with 4 other types of drivers.
Then decided to try regular GF3 drivers instead of Ti500 drivers, so I forced it to change to GF3 drivers, rebooted(from safe mode), and I actually got a login screen! I could log in, but I couldn't increase the resolution from 4 bit color.
Then it hit me, to try the Windows 2000 install I had on my C: (while running XP on my D:, funky drive choice problems, another long story from 2 weeks ago), and see if I could at least run that and salvage anything from my D: and then wipe it clean. However, when I tried to boot, it said that there were corrupted system files, and it needed to be repaired. Easy enough, just boot off the Win2k disk, it performed it's repairs, then let me into Win2k. This, however, was just a shell of the real Win2k...so much as running a program automatically froze the OS, and the only way to get out was to reboot.
Realizing that wasn't a better option than dealing with XP, at the moment, I rebooted and instead of choosing to boot to Win2k I just changed it to XP. Problem was, it did the same thing. So time to start tryign things in safe mode again, I guessed, but when I restarted, it showed me a report in DOS when trying to load, it was found that SYSTEM folder was corrupted, and Windows 2000 needed repairs! It had stopped recognizing the OS as XP!!
Now grasping the depth of this pile of $*%7 I had gotten myself into, I went into Win2k(retarded version), and checked if I could burn cds, but even though I just tried run Easy CD Creator, it froze up. Next I checked if I could at least open My Computer, which I could, and I could transfer files or folders across the drives. So I decided to make a folder named "backup" on my C: and put stuff I needed from my D: in there, then use my D: as my primary drive, after formatting it, and putting an OS on it. But when I tried to create a new folder, it froze. So I resorted to copying everything into my base C: directory, which worked. By then I was planning to simply format my D: and use that as a stepping stone, but couldn't format my drive because I had no win98 boot disks, nor could get the 'format' option to work in windows.
I asked a friend down the hall to do it for me, but he was a total ******* about it and said that I would have to pay him! So I called another friend up the street who had a bunch of computers, and he said that he could help me out, so I told him I'd let him know if I was going to come up that night(it was ~11 pm, by that time). Annoyed and drained, I decided to feel better by smoking up, which I did, and it helped, and went over to the girls down the hall to see what they were doing(watching a movie, it turned out), and ended up hanging with them for awhile. Anyway, eventually got to the friend's up the street, at 1:30, but we didn't manage to format the drive, because the only bootdisk he had wouldn't work, and the linux commands he was trying were giving him errors that the disk was too big(negative 279 megs, if you can believe it). I realized I could use my laptop to download a bootdisk, and so made out a whole list of things I needed to do just to be able to use a bootdisk to format my drive.
1.) Get floppy drive out of other computer
2.) Get floppy drive plugin for laptop
3.) Download bootdisk and put it on disk from laptop
4.) Install floppy drive in desktop
5.) Attempt to boot up and format drive
The next day, before I did that, I realized how hot the card had been getting, and decided to add some cooling. I had two normal sized heatsinks lying around, a FOP, and a low profile copper cooler. The FOP fit better, so I pasted it on the card, after removing the Blorb, with Arctic Silver Epoxy, and securing it with pieces of floss wrapped around the card. After probably playign with the card for too long, I installed it in the system. And booted up, to be greeted by a lovely single beep and BIOS options.
That list finally got done, around 5 this afternoon, then I attempted to run setup from the XP disk, which didn't work. So I went and borrowed a bootable Win98 CD from the previously mentioned 'guy down the hall'(who probably wishes to remain anonymous), got that, and started the installation up. When I did get there, it saw some files from my attempted XP install, and said that it needed to format the drive, so I let it. Got Win98 installed, ages later, and decided to go straight to XP, because someone had said a clean start and only installing the Microsoft Update fixed his 'Endless Loop' problem. As soon as I had installed the drivers, I boot into a black screen, with a white cursor. "No problem," I think to the GeForce, "I can just use Windows 2000, I didn't have problems with my GeForce 3 and Win2k, so there."
So I rebooted off the Win98 CD, reformatted, reinstalled, and after that, installed Win2k. By this time it was 1:30 AM, again. I booted up, Windows looked fine, and decided to install the 21.83 drivers, because they said "W2k" instead of "W2k/XP" like my others. Rebooted, to Win2k: retarded edition. Tried to boot into Win2k safe mode, to find an ugly greenish background, with a login box saying "Administrator" with a blank password box, which I couldn't reach, as the cursor would change to 'busy' as soon as I passed it over the login box.
By then, I had lost all hope, and decided I had been beaten, after those many many hours of battle. I restarted, changed the BIOS to Reset Configuration Data, for the installation of my Kyro 2, and powered down. I reached in to and grabbed the GF3 Ti500, pulled it out, only to find the FOP I had installed on the GPU earlier to be loose from the GPU, hanging onto the pieces of floss I had used(in addition to a 1/3 1/3 1/3 mixing of Arctic Epoxy) to keep in on. Problem is, I now realize, is that either the fact that the GPU had no heatsink, it was crashing(and had been previously with the Blorb because it had very little thermal paste beneath it). But then how did it not die? I would have thought the nVidia cores would fry as quickly as the athlon ones do. So maybe I just pulled the FOP loose when I took the card out, or it bumped against something in my case! Updates tomorrow or the next day, depending on my findings. For now, my FOP has a new layer of Epoxy on it with a sobe bottle balancing on it for pressure. Tomorrow I will (albeit briefly) test the 'loose heatsink' theory, and hopefully(although woefully) that will turn out to be the center of the problem.
