pbatton
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New Video card won't work in Windows!
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It might also help if you downloaded the correct drivers for the video card from the manufacturers of this card..
ASKER
He has the driver's for the video card, they came with it. I think I didn't make myself real clear here. He can't get thru the installation of Windows because during it, the picture goes all screwy and he can't see anything to go further - so he can't even get windows installed completely! It's fine in DOS and installation starts alright, but then it goes! I understand what you're trying to say about the frequency and that could be, but he can't get windows completely installed to a point where he can go in safe mode and fix it. Now to note another thing that has happened here. He borrowed an ISA video card and it worked fine, but when he went to install windows again his ACER CD-ROM won't work. It worked with his old 486 board, but not with the new Pentium board. Did Acer by any chance make a proprietary CD-ROM? I know Panasonic and Sony did, but never heard of Acer doing this. I fear I probably don't have enough info to follow through with all of this, but if anyone can give me thoughts that lead to us figuring out the problem, I'll be glad to award the points anyway. The frequency could be on the right track, but with no way to get into change it when installation doesn't even complete - that doesn't help too much. Any further ideas here? I thought he could install Windows while using the ISA card, but now the CD-ROM won't work. I have him trying lots of things tonight, so we'll see tomorrow night if he had any success with them. I mostly worry that he hasn't got settings in the BIOS right. I'm not even sure if he has the CD-ROM hooked to the second IDE or the sound card. I e-mailed my brother (who is helping him) to ask about those things and he'll reply tomorrow, most likely.
pbatton,
Acer had a proprietary 2x CDROM made by Panasonic.
If he has it, it needs the proprietary 40-pin interface to work, not IDE.
That interface is probably on the soundcard, so he may have to leave it in the system to get the CDROM working.
You'll also have to configure the startup files so Dos recognizes the CDROM in order to start Win95 setup. Let me know if you need help with editing them.
When you get the CDROM working again, select standard VGA when setup lists the devices it detected, and it should install Win95 okay.
You can then play with display and monitor settings, after you get Win95 running.
Regards,
Ralph
Acer had a proprietary 2x CDROM made by Panasonic.
If he has it, it needs the proprietary 40-pin interface to work, not IDE.
That interface is probably on the soundcard, so he may have to leave it in the system to get the CDROM working.
You'll also have to configure the startup files so Dos recognizes the CDROM in order to start Win95 setup. Let me know if you need help with editing them.
When you get the CDROM working again, select standard VGA when setup lists the devices it detected, and it should install Win95 okay.
You can then play with display and monitor settings, after you get Win95 running.
Regards,
Ralph
Oops..... Change my references to Win95 above, to Win98.
The comments still apply though.
Ralph
The comments still apply though.
Ralph
ASKER
rmarrota
Thanks for the suggestions and I am forwarding them to my brother to help my Dad try on his computer! The proprietary CD-ROM would explain that and I told him to check on that. Do you know if Windows 98 will support such a CD-ROM? Just recently having installed Windows 98 myself, I'm not sure that it gives you the option during setup of installing just a standard VGA driver, like Windows 95 did. I could be wrong though, as I just did an upgrade, maybe on a clean install it would. I have forwarded the suggestions on and we'll just have to wait and see if they help at all.
Thanks for the suggestions and I am forwarding them to my brother to help my Dad try on his computer! The proprietary CD-ROM would explain that and I told him to check on that. Do you know if Windows 98 will support such a CD-ROM? Just recently having installed Windows 98 myself, I'm not sure that it gives you the option during setup of installing just a standard VGA driver, like Windows 95 did. I could be wrong though, as I just did an upgrade, maybe on a clean install it would. I have forwarded the suggestions on and we'll just have to wait and see if they help at all.
I had no problems setting up a clean '98 Beta using that same type of proprietary CDROM and a "plain vanilla" (ISA/VGA) video card.
Ralph
Ralph
Hello Pbatton,
if I understand it right your fathers cd-rom is connected to the sound card. If he has a pentium board with primary/secondary ide interface on board, then I think the cd-rom is not working because it is connected to the third ide port which is noch installed by default. you have to add something to the driver so it recognises the third port. I'm not sure what you have to add to the command line of the driver for I'm using SCSI. But if I remember there should be a short help file for the driver which could answer the question. Try using the driver in the config.sys although it is normaly not needed it resolves some problems if you load it here because you can try out some of the switches to get it run!
if I understand it right your fathers cd-rom is connected to the sound card. If he has a pentium board with primary/secondary ide interface on board, then I think the cd-rom is not working because it is connected to the third ide port which is noch installed by default. you have to add something to the driver so it recognises the third port. I'm not sure what you have to add to the command line of the driver for I'm using SCSI. But if I remember there should be a short help file for the driver which could answer the question. Try using the driver in the config.sys although it is normaly not needed it resolves some problems if you load it here because you can try out some of the switches to get it run!
ASKER
Thanks to all of you who gave good answers although I cannot be sure because my father's computer is completely down still and it's hard to do this by long-distance. My brother tried a borrowed ISA video card and that worked but he still couldn't install Windows 98 because the system kept seeing and then not seeing the CD-ROM and would say it had errors while trying to install Windows 98. My brother than tried using his new 36X CD-ROM and it had the same problems! We're bewildered and think maybe it's a bad board. I have an older Tyan Titan board I could send him but still not sure about the video and cd-rom problems. I guess what I need to know now is - are the pci video cards only for svga? My father's monitor says it's a uvga - which I've never heard of. Does he need a ISA video card for a plain vga monitor? If so we're going to have to return the pci video card and buy one before going further with this.
pbatton,
Standard output from the PCI videocard will be 16-color VGA at 480x640. Any VGA monitor should have no trouble with this.
Installation errors may be caused by any number of things. We'll need more details about what he was doing when the error occurred to diagnose that problem.
Please reject (reopen the question) the proposed answer if it doesn't solve your problem.
Regards,
Ralph
Standard output from the PCI videocard will be 16-color VGA at 480x640. Any VGA monitor should have no trouble with this.
Installation errors may be caused by any number of things. We'll need more details about what he was doing when the error occurred to diagnose that problem.
Please reject (reopen the question) the proposed answer if it doesn't solve your problem.
Regards,
Ralph
ASKER
Ralph,
I only rated the answer "good" not because of your lack of expertise, but because there is no way I can know the outcome of this for some time to come and I want to award you the points and close the question. You've given me a lot of good answers and now I can help him work on a solution. My gut told me that the PCI video card "should" work and you validated that. Obviously there are other problems at work here. It's hard - as you know to diagnose without seeing when you don't have all the facts - and I don't have those to give you, my brother who is helping my father is a "copy machine tech" not a computer tech. He's only put together his own system before this and would not be familiar with all the problems that could come up, while upgrading my father's system. I've put together several, but the more I learn, the more I realize I don't know! I have another used Pentium motherboard that I know was working that I plan to send them to try. I'm a little suspect of the current board they have (a no-name) that they personally have never seen work! Anyway anything further goes beyond the context of my original question and I'm awarding the points because of your consistent help and good answers - we will use them in further diagnosising my Dad's problems.
I only rated the answer "good" not because of your lack of expertise, but because there is no way I can know the outcome of this for some time to come and I want to award you the points and close the question. You've given me a lot of good answers and now I can help him work on a solution. My gut told me that the PCI video card "should" work and you validated that. Obviously there are other problems at work here. It's hard - as you know to diagnose without seeing when you don't have all the facts - and I don't have those to give you, my brother who is helping my father is a "copy machine tech" not a computer tech. He's only put together his own system before this and would not be familiar with all the problems that could come up, while upgrading my father's system. I've put together several, but the more I learn, the more I realize I don't know! I have another used Pentium motherboard that I know was working that I plan to send them to try. I'm a little suspect of the current board they have (a no-name) that they personally have never seen work! Anyway anything further goes beyond the context of my original question and I'm awarding the points because of your consistent help and good answers - we will use them in further diagnosising my Dad's problems.
ASKER
I was trying to award the points to rmarrota - I guess I flubbed it. I do appreciate mikt's answer and help also and it is likely to be part of the solution too, but I didn't know how to split the points up! I'll close this question now and ask my next one to rmarrota and award points to him also to make this fair!