unix_based_punk

Is it at all possible to get a trident 9420 video card to work under windows 2000? All trident has is an NT 3.51 driver. Any ideas?

I managed to find an NT 4 driver and it didn't work.

The biggest thing is to check your manual to see with pci slots share with one another and with other onboard devices. All but one pci slot on my Asus A7V motherboard shares with something else. It sucks. PCI slot 1 shares with the AGP. SLot 2 shares with the Embedded Promise Ultra ATA/100 Controller. Slot 3 is free. Slot 4 shares with the USB controller ports yes ports, there are more than one. And slot 5 shares with the Audio Modem Riser slot. Ugh.

Tell Windows 2000 to use whatever interrupt is assigned to the printer port. That might help.

First of all, I would use either LILO or NT's boot manager if you're not already. Secondly, make sure your BIOS setting for the hard drive is set to LBA, not CHS. It's possible that a partition has truncated a cylinder or your MBR has been corrupted from a bad partitioning job. You didn't by any chance have the drive on an offboard or embedded Ultra ATA controller did you? If it was on the motherboard's IDE controllers, the BIOS readings would be different in terms of the drive's size compared to the BIOS readings of an offboard or embedded Ultra ATA controller. If your BIOS supports LBA32, you can install Linux beyond 1024 cylinders. If not, you can do a custom partiton job with linux fdisk or PM. I would go with what Rhadoo said and do a low-level IDE format of the drive and start over.

Blame the software first, then blame the hardware. Try downloading and installing the latest VIA 4-in-1 drivers to see if they fix the crashing and rebooting. I was getting memory dumps with my Asus A7V and windows 2000 service pack three fixed that. So make sure you have the latest service pack installed as well. You might also look for flash bios updates for the board. If you still have problems, then try a different fan. If it doesn't help, try a different power cord then try a different AC outlet. If none of those have any effect, then try a different power supply. If that fails, then it's probably a system board or processor problem. I said to check for an update for the flash bios because the board you have is still failry new and might still have some issues with the bios; possibly with voltage settings and so forth.

I would think it should work as long as the controller's bios can detect the drive and set its transfer rates.

Well, I put a new CMOS battery in there. NDD kept saying that there were lost clusters and errors in the free space count. Boot time was slower too. The new battery fixed those problems. Of course, the msi installer going crazy and all that could've been caused by win98 being screwed up as a result of the old battery. In fact, the old battery said,"98" on it. I'm not sure if that was the year or what.

Haven't tried either, yet. NT loader came up missing for some reason on his hard drive. I did a fixboot repair under console to fix the problem using boot disks. The bootfix didn't work, but when I changed the hard drive from User Define to AUTO, 2000 booted alright. I think the system CMOS or BIOS might be bad. Not sure. First time I loaded 2000 on his machine, I upgraded from 98 to 2000. It ran fine, then the ms installer came up by itself on startup and then the machine would reboot itself. Then the CMOS password was activiated when I turned the machine on later and my friend said that no one had touched it. And I was skeptical about that board since the beginning, but couldn't prove that there was anything wrong with it. In Battlezone II on his machine, the fonts are now appearing differently as if they've been altered. But on my system here, I'm just using the lastest patch for the game and a compatibility layer and it runs fine. I had no problems creating new players or anything. I don't have any problems on my system. So I don't know what's wrong.

Yeah, he has a USB sidewinder. I wonder if it's that Via chipset bug with USB. I remember seeing something about it on Microsoft's site.

Well, here's where it gets interesting. On my friend's machine, the machine having the trouble, he has an nVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 with a BCM GT93VA motherboard. He has the Via 693A chipset on the north bridge and the 586B Chipset on the south bridge. He has an 800 MHz Pentium III Processor. On my machine, I also have windows 2000, build 2195, SP2. I have an Asus A7V with a 700 MHz Duron and the KT133A North Bridge chipset and the 686A South Bridge chipset (both Via). I have an S3 Salvage 4 32MB AGP card. He has the latest drivers for his video and chipsets. I was getting a HAL error when I first tried to play Rogue Squadron. I updated my video card drivers and the problem went away. I had trouble making a player until I installed the patch for the game (rogueup1.2). The game plays fine. I'm running it with a Windows 98 compatibility layer. I didn't even use the qfixapp program. The only problem I have is if a program interrupts the game. When I try to go back in using ALT+TAB, the game doesn't work. But it restarts with no problem. So my question is, could the problem on my friend's machine be a hardware compatibility issue?

I used the qfixapp program but the game kicks out right after it shows the ships flying into the valley.

I was using the compatibility layer from SP2. I haven't tried the qfixapp yet.

In Windows 2000, the ACPI BIOS takes complete control of IRQ steering and routing. Unlike the traditional PCI BIOS which doesn't handle IRQ sharing as well, the ACPI BIOS can handle several PCI devices on one IRQ with no problem. On my Asus A7V, I have six devices on one IRQ.

I too am having trouble with Rogue Squdron with Windows 2000 SP2. I've never seen SP3 on microsoft's website. But when I run Rogue Squadron, sometimes it complains that it needs directx installed, other times, it'll kick out before the game completely loads. I installed and ran it with a windows 98 compatibility layer.

I've heard both good and bad things about windows 2000. I was wondering whether a jump from NT 4 to 2000 is worth it and if so, what am I getting that isn't offered in NT 4.0 other than full PnP and USB support?

There are some things I liked others I didn't like. One thing I didn't like was the web integrated GUI. Another thing was how everything was internet bound. I mean it said,"connect using dial up networking" on the log in dialog and I've seen other things in the OS about the internet and staying connected all the time. I'm still having a hard time handling 2000 because it's so windows like yet so NT like. Win9.x is so unstable though. I can't believe there are businesses running win95 instead of NT. That's crazy. Also I don't think 2000 likes my Celeron as much as it would like a Pentium. At least 2000 sees your ATA/IDE devices as ATA/IDE devices instead of seeing them as SCSI devices like NT 4 does. The shadow effect on the mouse is pretty cool, but I bet it takes up more memory. Linux's 2.4 kernel is supposed to have full PnP and USB support, too, so it's right behind 2000 because the kernel is still in development. I remember running win98 with my scanner and when I scanned something, the mouse would slow down briefly. This doesn't happen under NT/2k.

Well, I've upgraded to 2000. It took all my hardware and drivers and used them for the upgrade. The only thing that doesn't work is my epson stylus 440 printer which even has an updated driver for 2000 that I can download. I was amazed to say the least. To see Device Manager under NT was a thing of beauty. I sometimes have trouble remembering if I'm running 98 or NT because 2000 looks and behaves the way it does. I've heard of a 2000lite that will speed up win2000 by doing a shellswap or removing IE from windows. Everything is working here. The clash of the titans is taking place on my pc with Windows 2000 and Linux with the 2.4 kernel. It should be interesting to say the least.

Wait a minute....you say there's too many improvements in 2000 to name, yet you see no reason why I should run it? Apparently, NT4 isn't fully compatible with my 824 chipset (hence the SB PCI 128 problem) and I wondered if 2000's PnP would fix that issue.

Get about 256 MB of RAM and you could run just about anything with no problem. The more the memory the better off you are. The memory usage under Linux is similar to 2000 from what I understand (thanks to the X window system).

you have way to much money.

i have windows NT 4.0 workstation, a 333MHz celeron, 256MB of RAM. NT will not assign resources for my soundblaster PCI128 soundcard. Everything from my scanner to my video card has no problem, but the sound card will not work. I've tried to add the driver from the multimedia control applet and it won't take it. I installed it from the installation disk and it doesn't work. Updated driver has no effect. Motherboard is made by ABIT Model BF6 PIII Motherboard. Under the multimedia applet for the audio devices, the IRQ and ports are blanked out and the event log says the network device or resource is no longer availible. Plug and Play OS installed is NOT enabled in BIOS. I've covered every base i can think of at this point. Linux, BeOS, Win95/98 have no problem with this card and Linux and BeOS are not PnP OS's. Any help or ideas as to how i could manually assign resources would be nice. Any ideas you have can be helpful.