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.

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.

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?

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.