mumukenny
asked on
video adapter
I was attempting to put an agp video card I had sitting around into my parents HP that has windows XP. I disabled the vga adapter on the motherboard and set the video setting to vga. Then I installed the agp video card. it beeped 3 times to tell me that it had "bad video memory", but that isn't the problem. I'm not really not very concerned about installing the video card. I can now not get a picture to come up when it boots. It shows the HP banner and then shows the XP booting screen and after that the monitor goes blank. It appears to continue booting but there is no picture. I assume this is because of the adapter being disabled, but I do not know how to enable it again. I was told to try looking in the bios for a way to enable it and nothing has any effect on it.
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press f8 as soon as win xp starts loading to get the booting options screen, choose 'VGA mode' from the menu.
ASKER
I figured out that there were jumpers on the motherboard that I had to change. I did that and installed a tnt2 32 meg card. It now boots to the hp screen and then to the XP boot screen but then it goes black just like the with onboard vga. For some reason F8 and none of the other F-keys do anything when XP is loading. And safe mode doesn't work for some reason. It goes through a list of file in the system32 folder and once it gets to one called agp440 it stops and then reboots. I don't know what to do.
If you wait until XP starts loading to hit F* you are much too late. You need to be continuously pressing F8 after the POST screen displays.
1. When booting XP, try running it in safe mode, since it might be the reason that your previous display configuration is too much (e.g. resolution too high) for your new video card to handle.
(Try the steps in this link:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/default.asp?url=/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/boot_failsafe.asp) In safe mode, your computer uses standard VGA which the video card is able to handle.
2. There should be an option in BIOS for disable/enable the video chip in motherboard. (How did you disable it in the first place?) You have to either disable it and use your AGP video card; or enable it and use the one on board instead. Check the motherboard manual. Perhaps you can try resetting BIOS also (but you'll need to set things like date & time again)
3. Your video card might be defective. Try with another video card and see if you encounter the same problem.
Hope this helps!!