Radeon 7000 ( VE )

[Red Stripe]

I've got a 32 mb radeon 7000 that won't install with either win 2000 pro or
XP pro. I'm quad booting along with win 98 and Linspire ( Lindows). The card
works fine with 98 and lindows OS's. I've tried the earliest and latest ATI
drivers for the 2000 and XP OS's and no luck. When either system boots I get
a desktop that has segmented vertical lines. ie double desktop icons and
system tray icons. Seems like it should be a driver problem but I'm totally
confused by the behavior. I've tried various screen resolutions and refresh
rates with no success Any clues greatly appreciated.

 

[Paul Murphy]

It will be associated with the way you've setup your quad booting
arrangement. I bet if you try the card in a machine just running Windows
2000 or XP it will work fine. Its probably trying to load the Windows 98
driver under 2000 and XP - hence the problem. How do you have the partitions
setup?

Paul

 

[Red Stripe]

Hi Paul,
Thanks for the reply.
I've tried the installation with XP or 2000 on a separate HD (not dual
boot ) with the same results.I had ATI tech support involved and they came
to the conclusion of faulty memory.Something about the 32 bit OS's. Sounded
like BS to me.

 

[Paul Murphy]

And was the OS installed from the ground up (on a completely empty
partitionless drive) with the card already in the machine and all other HDDs
disconnected or removed? What happened (precisely) during the OS
installation procedure - i.e. where did it start to go wrong and what
screens were uncorrupted?

Paul

 

[Red Stripe]

Paul,
I just did a fresh install of win2k sp4.After the installation was complete
I did a windows update and downloaded only the ATI driver. vers
5.13.1.6071.As soon as the driver installed on a reboot the problem
resurfaced.I booted to safemode and uninstalled the driver and tried version
5.13.1.3102 which is one of the earliest drivers.That didn't work as I got a
message that my hardware didn't match. I then tried 5.13.1.3276 and system
boots to a black screen. I can boot VGA mode fine though.BTW my BIOS and
ATI's utility show the card as 16MB instead of 32. Thanks for your help.
JB

 

[Paul Murphy]

You mentioned that you'd tried XP as well. XP should have native drivers
built in for the 7000 VE card. I'm not sure if Win2K SP4 does but I suspect
not - did you try just installing the motherboard drivers and DirectX 9.0c
after the fresh install and see if the card was correctly detected natively?
You went on to install the VGA drivers - motherboard chipset drivers and
latest DirectX 9.0c need to be installed before even contemplating
installing VGA card drivers as the card needs them installed first. What
video related settings have you selected in your motherboards BIOS (e.g.
have you selected Assign IRQ to VGA and selected a suitable AGP Aperture
size as per here: http://www.ati.com/support/faq/cmosagp.html ) I'm not
aware of cards incorrectly displaying their ram amount unless an attempt has
been made to flash the wrong BIOS onto the card or the wrong drivers are
used - when it worked fine under Windows 98 did the ATI utility correctly
identify both the card and the amount of ram onboard it? Personally I
wouldn't use windows update for drivers as I've had it try to install older
drivers over the top of the latest, perfectly serviceable drivers for my
Intel NIC. Its much better to just download the latest Catalyst package
supported by your card from the ATI website - in the case of the Radeon
7000VE its the Catalyst 5.2 set for Win2k. here
http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html the (very old) ones you've attempted
to use aren't designed for Windows 2000 with SP4 so that might explain the
problems.

Paul

 

[Red Stripe]

Paul,
I neglected to mention that I installed DirectX 9.0C first thing.I installed
the latest 5.2 driver and no go with that either. XP does install a driver
but the behavior is the same.It's hard to keep XP from installing drivers
when i'm trying to troubleshoot the problem. I can access info with the
messed up screens. Not very easy but I've changed refresh rates from 60 to
85 and also resolution from 800x600 to 1024x768 and also color depth from
256 to 32 bit. I've also played with the hardware acceleration setting.I've
tried bios settings for IRQ allowed and not. My apperature is set at 64.

 

[Paul Murphy]

What about the motherboard chipset drivers/inf files - were they installed
before DirectX 9.0c? Do you have the correct monitor installed under the
OS.If the WinXP native drivers still give the problem (even with the
motherboard chipset drivers installed) then it may be time to contact your
hardware provider for the card. When you mentioned the behaviour is "the
same" - the same as which scenario (blank or corrupted screen)?

Paul