HotTunaFish

I'm having some serious issues with my system not recognizing my Radeon 9500 pro video adapter. Recently for some reason any reference of the display adapter disapeared in my device manager, and when I went into properties, settings, advanced, and then adapter, the adapter says VGASafe. I have uninstalled any previous drivers for this card, but unable to have windows find the card as new hardware. I have also updated my system bios, chipset drivers, reinstalled 4 in 1 drivers which also updated the agp drivers, even went as far to wipe my entire sytem clean and start from scratch, reinstalled XP and it will still not recognize the card. I thought that there may be a problem with my AGP slot, but ironically, I can put an old GForce MX 400 64mb card in the same slot and xp automatically sees the card without any problems. I am at a complete loss to figure out what is wrong and would greatly appreicate any help or feedback that could get me going in the right direction. I know the card is not the problem because it works in another PC I have. To add insult to injury, I also went out and purchased two different other 512mb AGP adapters, and neither one would even allow me to boot into windows. (I have a 450 watt PS) I would love to just replace my MSI motherboard, and everthing else right now, but the money is not there so I'm stuck with crappy graphics from a 8 year old 64meg card and would love to get back where I was before. HELP!!

Rubix

OK I'm a little out of time right now and I'll be back later. You say 4 in 1?? is that a VIA board. I think you said MSI; what chipset. I'm using a MSI 845PE Intel chipset. It detects my 9800 all in wondr, no probs. It sounds like your PnP is not detecting the card. As a premature guess it sound like a MOBO problem. XP doesn't have any Probs with ATI PnP detection. Off the top ... Bios NVRAM or Battery probs, but that is just a guess at this point.

Back later.................

HotTunaFish

Rubix, Yes the drivers installed were VIA 4 in 1, along with the VIA chipset drivers version 5,11A on a MSI MS-6712 (v1.x) ATX KT4V Series motherboard w/via KT400 chipset. I also though it was a MOBO issue, except that it accepts my inferior 64mb card without blinking when I slap it in the AGP slot and doesn't even ask me to load the drivers for it. As far as battery problems, I haven't had any. Bottom line is this was a PC I built a few years ago and has worked perfectly running all my apps, digital editing, games etc. The only thing I can relate this to is that my video adapter crapped out just about the same time I created a dual partition on my HD to run both Vista and XP Pro same time. I have since reformatted my 250gb HD 4 times with a single partition only running XP, but XP refuses to detetect my 9500 pro or any of the newer 512 mb cards I used such as a Visiontek Radeon x1600xt 512MB or the PNY GForce 7600GS 512MB. Before installing these cards, I upgraded my powere supply to 450 watts from the 300 I had, so I don't think this is a power issue. When trying to use either card, after booting up and getting past post processing, the screen would go black and lock up with a tiny little red square on the right side of the screen with a letter in it, and another small white square towards the left of the screen that looked as if there was a flashing cursor in it. Using these cards also prevented me from even going into safe mode. I have since returned both cards back to the store and left with what I have now, which is a pretty lame card. I appreciate your help in any way that can give me some better insight as to something I could be doing differently. I usually use my system for work, some digital editing and of course gotta play some games once in a while, but that's out of the question with the graphics limitations I have. I look very forward to any further suggestions or advise that can be given to get me going in the right direction.