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Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#1
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Display adapter failes despite being correctly installed.
Any ideas about this one?
What happens is that the manual install appears to work, but on rebooting, the display settings dialog shows and defaults to 16 colour 640*480 VGA. Nothing shifts this, yet according to the driver details in the device manager, it's installed properly. Bootlog.txt also appears to confirm, there are no errors in my test system that do not also appear in my main (fully working) system. I'll Google as many times as I have to, but it's almost impossible to get signal out of noise for any search involving words like graphics, video, or display, for obvious reasons, so I'm hoping someone here has already been there, done that, etc.. And knows specifically what sysfiles or registry entries are missing or borked when this happens. |
#2
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Display adapter fails despite being correctly installed.
Lostgallifreyan wrote in
: Any ideas about this one? What happens is that the manual install appears to work, but on rebooting, the display settings dialog shows and defaults to 16 colour 640*480 VGA. Nothing shifts this, yet according to the driver details in the device manager, it's installed properly. Bootlog.txt also appears to confirm, there are no errors in my test system that do not also appear in my main (fully working) system. I'll Google as many times as I have to, but it's almost impossible to get signal out of noise for any search involving words like graphics, video, or display, for obvious reasons, so I'm hoping someone here has already been there, done that, etc.. And knows specifically what sysfiles or registry entries are missing or borked when this happens. Small bit of extra info: changing settings is possible up to a point, trying to choose 1024*768 via that slider works, but forces 256 colour, no true- colour modes. Also, the display won't really accept the changes. On reboot it locked up with a narrow band of some greenish blurp across the top of the screen. I forced reboot (hardware reset button required), extracted the registry to file, reset display settings to 4 bits, 640*480, added it back, rebooted, so I got a desktop view again but only a reversion to where I was before. |
#3
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Sorted.. Was Display adapter fails despite being correctly installed.
Problem fixed now, but I'm still curious about this stuff...
thanatoid wrote in : (Transplanted from earlier thread: Generic video (VGA) driver?) If you look in there and get lost awhile it is entirely easy to lose any distinction. Given that monitors can't do all resolutions and refresh rates anyway, it makes some sense not to think of these settings as relevant only to the adapter. The monitor is usually best left as "plug and play monitor", especially depending on what video drivers you are using. Some of them are a real PITA to set up. You have to go BOTH into desktop-rightclick-properties, AND into Control Panel. A bunch of times. It turns out that a manual install OR a standalone EXE-based install works fine, but the pre-conditions are important: NO MONITOR DRIVER. I wrote notes to myself years ago to this effect because the default W98 monitor driver/info/whatever it is it installs if we say yes, or it doesn't even ask, broke other later device specific monitor installs if W98 was allowed to find its own Plug and Play monitor device info first. At the time I just accepted this deliberate veto of the default W98 PNP monitor install as a kludge that worked in absence of better understanding, instead of trusting my judgement and accepting the truth: 1, the simplest explanation is usually the right answer, once consistently appearing time after time. 2, the breakage extends not just to trying a subsequent install for specific monitors, but also for display adapters! (And 3. I should trust my instincts better, as my text which Thanatoid quoted above reveals I had sensed before I fixed this.) What I don't understand, and I hope someone can tell me, is why something like a monitor needs specific device drivers when (as John Gilliver said in the thread I got Thanatoid's text from) it's the adapter that determines the capability of the display, unless you try to force display modes the monitor can't do at all. W98, if you point it to the install cabs for other stuff it finds like FireWire ports, or USB, remembers the location (InstallLocationsMRU in the registry). What that means is that if the cab files location becomes the default path to look into, the monitor PNP driver info gets installed without prompting us, so we can't even say no! I think this is the main cause of the infamous snarlups when installing display adapters in W98, as Thanatoid said back there.. The answer seems to be to install the adapter as early as possible, to make sure W98 cannot see the cab files path as default, so that it MUST always prompt us when it wants to install the monitor. Then we MUST say no to that install (press ESC or click cancel), until we're prompted again AFTER installing the display adapter. This works every time, but I'm not sure why the display adapter driver installer can't be relied on to get it right without blindly trusting a default PNP monitor driver that has no clue about the monitor actually there, or what manual fix is best if a monitor install slips by and breaks things before we get the adapter installed. Any thoughts? |
#4
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Sorted.. Was Display adapter fails despite being correctly installed.
Two more off-the-wall weirdnesses about installing the display adapter
driver: Don't try to force standard VGA 16 colour, 640*480 pixels before reboot hoping that it will restart without locking the system into an unusuable graphics mode. While it DOES have the desired effect, it breaks the new install by forcing settings based on defaults that conflict with the not-yet- established settings of the new driver! So I have to trust it to install, either it DOES force an unusuable config by default, or it works. No way to know if something else borked it already till after that first reboot! Which brings me to weirdness number 2. XMSDSK.EXE RAM drive! Don't do it. Whether this is to do with the RAM drive sysfile or the choice of drive size I have no idea, all I know is that while XMSDSK.EXE is excellent, don't set it up till the display adapter is installed! I don't know wy this is so, but I agree with Thanatoid, that display adapters are BY FAR the fussiest of ALL possible hardware subsystems to correctly install, and as I got mine to work even before trying to install bussmaster drivers or whatever else Via put in their 4in1 package, it seems to make sense to force the display adapter install (preferably manual, no InstallShield garbage left behind that way) as total first priority, no matter what. Given that the Via 4in1 is supposed to put in an AGP support of some kind it is especially weird that installing the display adapter beforehand works at all! I'm beyond claiming understanding, but my tests are rigorous, I can repeat every test and observation I describe here. One of the nice things about Ghost! It lets me reinstall a small W98 system eight times in ten minutes (including reboots to the desktop to see the result) if I really want to do that, so I get plenty of repeatable starting conditions for these tests. |
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