BSoD on bootup

[zaijian 0]

Well, my win2k is in danger of being reinstalled right about now. Good thing I have win98 dual booted so I can get on this forum and ask questions

 

The deal is that, when booting win2k, it stops the process about halfway, and the BSoD pops up with the error, "PAGE FAULT IN NONPAGED AREA". It's not my ram. It's not my pagefile. I have narrowed it down to my video card, or more specifically, my video card drivers. I have an ATI radeon AIW, and by swapping it out with a piece of junk vidcard, win2k boots up fine. Put the ATI back in, BSoD during bootup. I don't even know why the heck it would do this to me now, I haven't installed any new vidcard drivers or done any windowsupdate patches in a while, it pretty much happened out of the blue. This is the 2nd time this particular BSoD has happened to me, the first time was a few months ago, and I ended up reinstalling win2k. I have no such desire to do so now. So my theory is, that if I can clean up all references to ATI display drivers, then reinstall those, I should be fine. Any ideas on how to do that? I've already deleted all ati*.* in \winnt\system32, \winnt\inf dirs. What else can I do to make win2k not use ati drivers when I stick the card back in?

 

ANY IMMEDIATE HELP WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED.

[FatFish 0]

Use your old video card.

Boot to normal mode, and download the latest ATI video card driver.

Then boot into the safe mode, delete all the ATI video drivers that you have.

replace your old video card with your ATI card, boot to normal, win2k should regonize your ati as a standard vga card. Then install the new downloaded latest driver from ati

[FatFish 0]

oh sorry, i didn't read your post carefully.

beside deleteing the ati*.* and the *.inf in system32.

make sure you remove the listing of ati video cards in the device manager while you are in safe mode.

 

Good luck.

[zaijian 0]

Also, this happens no matter how I try to boot up win2k - safe, safe w/ networking, vga mode, etc, etc, etc. ANY WIN2K bootup = BSoD

[Brian Frank 0]

That's because ATI doesn't know how to write good drivers for Win2k.

Unfortunately, ATI kills their cards with their awful drivers.

Heh, me have Nvidia. Hell, 3dfx provided better drivers than ATI does, which makes me wonder why ATI is still in business.

[zaijian 0]

Yeah, ATI has been lacking in the drivers. But what I don't get is why it's been working well for so long, then just now it BS's like this. I didn't even install anything that would have changed any video driver settings or files.

 

I have just spent the past few hours uninstalling/reinstalling video drivers, repairing my win2k install, etc etc etc, no luck. For the moment I have given in and put the other video card in, so I can check the forums

 

I think it's time to contact ATI tech supt.

[FatFish 0]

maybe there is something wrong with your card at hardware level, not software.

since windows use the generic vga driver to go to the safe mode without using your ati driver.

Try plug your ATI into other computer, see if it has the same problem.

[zaijian 0]

I COULD plug the ATI into another comp, but why bother. I can boot into Win98 just fine, and there's no problem whatsoever. It's a driver/software issue.

[zaijian 0]

Well, I downloaded the latest leaked drivers for the ATI card, put the ati card in, booted to safe mode, installed drivers, rebooted, BSoD. Hmmmm.... Now I'm going to assume that it's not an ATI driver per se that's causing the problem, but rather a windows sytem file interacting with the ati driver that's causing the problem. Is there any sort of way to determine if a windows dll or something has been corrupted? I'm going to assume that it's a small out-of-the-way sort of file, since the win2k cd emergency repair process did not fix it.

[Brian Frank 0]

Well, does the BSOD list any file as the culprit?

[zaijian 0]

Not at all. It's about as informative as a brick. I just got another fatal BSoD now, SPECIAL POOL DETECTED MEMORY CORRUPTION. This came after reinstalling SP2 and DX8. Grrrreeeeat.

[Brian Frank 0]

*scratches head* Uhhhhhhh, hmmm, I don't know what to say. Um, we could do a clean install, but, me thinks that's not what you want...

Check your BIOS settings with AGP stuff: set the drive strength to DA or auto if possible, and disable AGP4x. Probably won't do anything, but it's worth a shot.

[zaijian 0]

Around 12:30 today, I broke down and began the process of reinstalling win2k. I started off by backing up all the "documents and settings" folders, and then booted off the CD and installed on top of my current install. 4 hours later, mostly back up and running, and everything is running fine now. I hate bad software.