H
Homer J. Simpson
Hi all,
I have a machine that initially had XP x86, an Nvidia 6600GT (PCI-Express)
and a couple of PCI ATI cards (a Radeon 7000 and a 7500, to be exact) for
multi-monitor purposes. I installed XP x64 shortly after it came out back
in 2005 (?), which I've been using almost exclusively after about a week or
two of slow migration. x64 has actually been reinstalled on this machine a
couple of times since (now being my primary OS), and I've only rebooted to
XP x86 a few times here and there (mainly, to use partition resizing tools
that don't work yet on x64). The machine's been running fine with this
configuration for years.
About two months ago I replaced the 6600GT with an 8800GTS, and only
recently--the first time since that upgrade--I've found out that XP x86
doesn't seem to like the card--it refuses to run in anything but
640x480x4-bit color. I've installed the latest x86 driver (158.22)
repeatedly, but I'm still stuck at that resolution/fugly colors. Going to
the Display Properties applet from Control Panel pops up a dialog box saying
it's forcing the use of the basic VGA driver--despite the card's properties
tab saying the card/driver are working fine (and the card correctly
identified as an 8800). The other cards are also still identified correctly
and each is providing an independant display as expected, and I can change
their resolution, but not the color depth--if I'm not mistaken, in such a
scenario, the color depth is forced to the lowest common denominator...I may
be wrong on this...but that's besides the point. Oh, and it's definitely
*not* running in safe mode--all the usual safe mode warnings are kinda hard
to miss...
Given that the 8800 card and 158.22 driver have been out for quite a bit of
time now, I'd expect to see tons of posts regarding it in combination with
XP x86 if this was a widespread problem, but it doesn't looks like that's
the case. I suspect that it simply doesn't like to co-exist with my other
ATI cards (which I suspect is not as common a scenario). But, what the
hell, I only boot up this OS every once in a blue moon, so I can't say I'm
particularly concerned. I'm on XP x64 99.9% of the time and don't have any
issues with any of the cards working together on *that* OS.
Yesterday I had a little bit of time on my hands, so for the hell of it I
decided to try to dig a little deeper into this. I soon realized that a
*lot* of system services weren't even running, including some really basic
ones like Workstation, Server, networking...in other words, things that
should be running out of the box with a default install. *That*, I was a
little more concerned about. Last time I was running x86, I didn't have any
such issue. Swapping the video card caused *those* sort of side-effects?!
So rather than waste any more time diagnosing problems on an OS installation
I don't particularly care about, I've decided to just reinstall it on top of
itself (thinking the install procedure would overwrite whatever settings are
causing these more widespread problems). That is, reinstall on the same
partition, without reformatting--something I normally wouldn't do,
yada-yada, I'm making an exception in this case since, again, I just need
this OS to be "functional enough" to quickly run a couple of tools that
don't work on x64 and reboot. A quick reinstall should've made me happy.
So I go through the installation procedure, and during the 'installing
devices' phase (where it says there's ~34 minutes left), it gets
stuck...I've let it sit there for a good half-hour with no activity besides
the little green lights animation on the screen (and no disk or CD access),
reset the system, let it pick up where it left off...same thing.
Now...given that this system still works perfectly fine on XP x64, I'm not
quite willing (yet) to start taking the time to mess around removing cards
until the installation succeeds (assuming that's the problem...)...but I'm
afraid I'll eventually have to resort to doing just that. XP x64 works
right now, despite the x86 installation being FUBAR, but sooner or later
it'll come a time where I'm gonna have to reboot into x86 to run some 32-bit
tool.
Short of starting to mess with the hardware, does anyone have any
suggestion? I'm not 100% convinced (yet) that reformatting the x86
partition, as opposed to just reinstalling on top of itself, will work any
better, but I'll do it if I have to. Both OSes are located on the same
physical drive (partitions C: and D: for x86 and x64, respectively), so I'm
assuming I should be able to get away with just adding the x64 entry
manually in the boot.ini after reinstalling, since the x86 installer won't
add it back after a clean install...or am I wrong on this and I'll have to
run a repair install of x64 regardless (to run FIXMBR and what-not)?
The board's an ASUS A8N-E, its BIOS version is 1013, and the CPU's an Athlon
X2 4800. The three video cards have already been enumerated above. The
hard drives (4 of 'em) are all SATA, plus an IDE DVD burner.
Sorry for the long post, but I figured I'd be better off getting into the
how the system got into its current state...
I have a machine that initially had XP x86, an Nvidia 6600GT (PCI-Express)
and a couple of PCI ATI cards (a Radeon 7000 and a 7500, to be exact) for
multi-monitor purposes. I installed XP x64 shortly after it came out back
in 2005 (?), which I've been using almost exclusively after about a week or
two of slow migration. x64 has actually been reinstalled on this machine a
couple of times since (now being my primary OS), and I've only rebooted to
XP x86 a few times here and there (mainly, to use partition resizing tools
that don't work yet on x64). The machine's been running fine with this
configuration for years.
About two months ago I replaced the 6600GT with an 8800GTS, and only
recently--the first time since that upgrade--I've found out that XP x86
doesn't seem to like the card--it refuses to run in anything but
640x480x4-bit color. I've installed the latest x86 driver (158.22)
repeatedly, but I'm still stuck at that resolution/fugly colors. Going to
the Display Properties applet from Control Panel pops up a dialog box saying
it's forcing the use of the basic VGA driver--despite the card's properties
tab saying the card/driver are working fine (and the card correctly
identified as an 8800). The other cards are also still identified correctly
and each is providing an independant display as expected, and I can change
their resolution, but not the color depth--if I'm not mistaken, in such a
scenario, the color depth is forced to the lowest common denominator...I may
be wrong on this...but that's besides the point. Oh, and it's definitely
*not* running in safe mode--all the usual safe mode warnings are kinda hard
to miss...
Given that the 8800 card and 158.22 driver have been out for quite a bit of
time now, I'd expect to see tons of posts regarding it in combination with
XP x86 if this was a widespread problem, but it doesn't looks like that's
the case. I suspect that it simply doesn't like to co-exist with my other
ATI cards (which I suspect is not as common a scenario). But, what the
hell, I only boot up this OS every once in a blue moon, so I can't say I'm
particularly concerned. I'm on XP x64 99.9% of the time and don't have any
issues with any of the cards working together on *that* OS.
Yesterday I had a little bit of time on my hands, so for the hell of it I
decided to try to dig a little deeper into this. I soon realized that a
*lot* of system services weren't even running, including some really basic
ones like Workstation, Server, networking...in other words, things that
should be running out of the box with a default install. *That*, I was a
little more concerned about. Last time I was running x86, I didn't have any
such issue. Swapping the video card caused *those* sort of side-effects?!
So rather than waste any more time diagnosing problems on an OS installation
I don't particularly care about, I've decided to just reinstall it on top of
itself (thinking the install procedure would overwrite whatever settings are
causing these more widespread problems). That is, reinstall on the same
partition, without reformatting--something I normally wouldn't do,
yada-yada, I'm making an exception in this case since, again, I just need
this OS to be "functional enough" to quickly run a couple of tools that
don't work on x64 and reboot. A quick reinstall should've made me happy.
So I go through the installation procedure, and during the 'installing
devices' phase (where it says there's ~34 minutes left), it gets
stuck...I've let it sit there for a good half-hour with no activity besides
the little green lights animation on the screen (and no disk or CD access),
reset the system, let it pick up where it left off...same thing.
Now...given that this system still works perfectly fine on XP x64, I'm not
quite willing (yet) to start taking the time to mess around removing cards
until the installation succeeds (assuming that's the problem...)...but I'm
afraid I'll eventually have to resort to doing just that. XP x64 works
right now, despite the x86 installation being FUBAR, but sooner or later
it'll come a time where I'm gonna have to reboot into x86 to run some 32-bit
tool.
Short of starting to mess with the hardware, does anyone have any
suggestion? I'm not 100% convinced (yet) that reformatting the x86
partition, as opposed to just reinstalling on top of itself, will work any
better, but I'll do it if I have to. Both OSes are located on the same
physical drive (partitions C: and D: for x86 and x64, respectively), so I'm
assuming I should be able to get away with just adding the x64 entry
manually in the boot.ini after reinstalling, since the x86 installer won't
add it back after a clean install...or am I wrong on this and I'll have to
run a repair install of x64 regardless (to run FIXMBR and what-not)?
The board's an ASUS A8N-E, its BIOS version is 1013, and the CPU's an Athlon
X2 4800. The three video cards have already been enumerated above. The
hard drives (4 of 'em) are all SATA, plus an IDE DVD burner.
Sorry for the long post, but I figured I'd be better off getting into the
how the system got into its current state...