booting and/or videocard problem

[NoviceBill 0]

I have a compaq presario with a pentium III CPU. Recently replaced the hard drive with a 80GB Western Digital drive, and did a clean install of Windows 2000. It wouldn't boot unless I went into Safe Mode or Enable VGA Mode, even after I reinstalled the drivers for the video card, so I assumed the video card was bad (a nVidia Riva TNT2 Model 64). Replaced it with an ATI Radeon 7000, and the computer did boot up, but when I installed the driver for the videocard, it again refused to boot (gives a blank screen midway through the boot process). This seems to be a pattern: it won't boot (except in safe or vga modes) once I install the drivers for the video card. I (now) have two videocards, and it does the same thing with either. I've tried all kinds of permutations, like uninstalling all drivers, switching videocards, rebooting and reinstalling, etc., but can't seem to get it to work. It worked before I switched hard drives, but the old hard drive now does the same thing. Any ideas? Thanks for any help.bold textitalic textbold text

[Sampson 0]

Compaqs can be difficult. You need to go into your BIOS and make sure that when it boots it defaults to AGP not PCI. Also, you need to see what IRQ is assigned to the video card. I am presuming that your AGP is at least 2X compliant and not 1X that mimics 2X.

When you installed windows it is surprising that 2000 didn't recognize the video card and install the "windows" version of the nvidia drivers originally.

To install either Nvidia drivers or ATI drivers the VGA Mode is supposed to be enabled in the first place. Bring up windows and uninstall all video drivers through Add/Remove Software from the Control Panel. Some people use Driver Cleaner: http://www.driverheaven.net/cleaner/ to get all of the driver residue out. In any case, you should go into your device manager and find out what IRQ the video card is using and check to see if it is strung to some other device that is making it not be recognized properly. Then, remove whatever video adapter is there to force Windows to find your new card and install it. Or, if it doesn't, reboot the computer and it should tell you that you have new hardware. Both of the cards are pretty old. Which ever one you choose to use, I would (at least the first time) let windows install the drivers it has available for that card.

You didn't mention if the computer is seeing the whole hard drive or not. The Bios of some older computers may only see 20gigs and no more and this can be a problem.

Finally, if your AGP slot is not working, you might try a PCI video card just to see if you can skirt the IRQ issue or the memory overrun issue since Windows has a bad habit of hooking the video IRQ to the universal bus controllers.