Video card freezes system up in a loop

[BrentJ]

I built a pc with a Soyo mb with onboard video. When I originally built it (about 1 1/2 months ago)I installed a Radeon 9200 video card and it caused the system to crash so I put in an old Radeon 7500 instead and it worked fine. Windows (XP) got really gunked up and I had to reload it. During the Windows installation when it got about halfway through installing devices the screen would blank out and the system would restart causing a loop. I determined the prob to be the video card and removed to complete the windows install. Once windows was up and running I re-installed the video card. Again upon detection of the card the screen blanked and the system rebooted into a loop. I have set the primary video to AGP in the BIOS, tried with Assign IRQ to PCI Video enabled and disabled to no avail. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[BadBigBen]

Boot up in to SafeMode, go to the Device Mangler delete any reference to the GFX-Card (old and new)...

then go to Start, RUN, enter RegEdit, look for the following KEYS:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MASCHINE]\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\ENUM\PCI\XXXX

where XXXX is the subkey of your HARDWARWE installed (under there find your GFX-Cards and DELETE them) you may have to set permission to delete the keys (Right Click)...

Same goes for ControlSet002 etc...

then go to [HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG]\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\PCI search here again for your GFX-CARD and Delete the corresponding keys...

when Done, Reboot system with the GFX-CARD of your choice and have a good correct functioning DRIVER for it ready (usually comes with the gfx-card on a CD) as windows will ask for it once you've booted up or it will install it's build in drivers and you have to manually install the drivers over these later...

this is a quick and dirty trick... or you may have to wipe the current install and do a fresh and clean install...

Ben


If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer...

 

[BrentJ]

Thanks Ben for the help. I will try that and let you know how it works. However, I don't know that a clean install will fix anything as this was the second clean install since the problem started and it caused the problem during the os install. Also, (I'm not sure about this but) i seem to recall that in the past if I had two video cards physically installed even before I installed drivers or anything with the os that I could plug the monitor into either one and still get a picture but on this one if there is a card physically plugged into the agp slot the onboard will not display anything including the bios. I'm thinking that maybe it is a resource conflict (I'm not positive that the onboard was PCI either, it could be AGP, it is a client's PC and not in my posession at the moment.) Any thoughts? Thanks.

Brent