Older box has a nvidia FX5200 GForce card. Worked fine and as i was finished doing a clean reinstall of XP PRO after a reformatt of the drive ( giving that box to high school so wiped the hard drive from layman's eyes). All was fine and dandy UNTIL. Everything was up and running after i did the normal updates of the motherboard, etc. Then i went to nvidia and downloaded the latest vid card driver that worked fine on my newest box with a vid card that it uses. Nvidia always says backward compatable or someor whatever, with that in mind i downloaded the driver and got a pop up saying the driver was not for that card. I figured no problem i will just go in and delete the driver. BUT, before i could do that the screen started to look like a 16 year olds brain synapsis just before doing the "OD" thing. Then i could see i was not going to be able to get in the control panel to delete the driver, the screen blanked out. I rebooted and NOTHING, could not boot up, period. I hooked the screens up to another pc and they work fine. I took the vid card and tried it in another oc and it still works..... THEN i took the other vid card from the good box and out it in the box that went gonzo and fired it up. NOTHING I went in and tripped the cmos by taking the pins off of pins 1-2 and moved the pin to 2-3 and then put back to pins 1-2, still nothing. ( watching ES as i type this, no take out of the globex high yet, ) I am wondering if i tried to clear the coms with the power on. (i know better, but might have not been thinking). I know the cause was the wrong driver. This is a new one on me. Any ideas? I tried to just say screw it and went to do another reinstall of XP again BUT can not get booted up to try anything . LOST in a pile opf dung. PS, we nailed the globex high back there. we have a way of filling overnight gaps.
Monitors are all ok I also did this in trying another vid card in the messed up box. the different card did not correct the problem but when i put that card (NVS 280, quadro, pny) out and put it back in another box it worked BUT GREEN background. the original FX5200 card that was in and caused the problem works fine in another box. O well. After mkt closes i will get back in and try some magic. thks. MAGIC, ha ..
can you port the hard drive to another pc (as a secondary drive), and delete the driver there? Then bring it back and see results.
Why hassle with the hard drive? (unless you have nothing else to do and want to experience the experience). It's a fresh install. Reformat (again). Done. Osorico
Boot XP in Safe Mode (F8 during boot) - that will load the standard windows VGA driver. If that doesn't work then the problem isn't the driver.
Where did hog say the sceen is blank? He said it has a green background, and from my read, it sounds like the green background is in windows, not during post. Posting does not use windows drivers. So if the screen is indeed blank during post, it is a) the video card is fried, or b) the motherboard. Osorico
I got the impression he couldn't see anything from the computer with the bad video driver, even when adding a good video card. If he can see under F8 default driver(GTS had good sanity check), then reformat sounds good.
Like osorico said, if you can't see anything before the driver is loaded (PC Power-Up Self-Test & OS boot sequence) then it isn't the driver that is the problem. Re-installing the OS should be no problem if you want to go that route, just boot directly from the XP CD. Personally I would boot to safe mode, uninstall the bad driver (if it lets you) and reinstall the last known working driver.