Changing display adapters on Win-98

Nathan Bjork · 04-26-2004, 09:05 PM

Hi,

My friend recently bought a new graphics card and gave me his old nVidia GeForece4 MX 420, and so I went to install this card into me 98 machine. At first it installed it as a standard VGA, then I went to the setting and couldnt change to 1024,or above 16 colors. So I went to change the driver and found the Riva 128 as the only adapter besides the TNT. My friend told me is was 128mb but didnt know the exact model name. So I installed the Riva 128 driver, and it would only boot in safe mode, when I tryed to boot in normal mode it would say I have to restart my comp before the desktop would show. So I put the old one in and went to nvidias web site, took the heat sink off of the new card, found it was the geFroce4 mx 420, so I DL'ed those drivers and set the driver to the right driver. So now when I go to the display, setting, advance, adapters... it always says its a Riva 128, when I hit change it says install driver for unkown device, and when i select the MX 420 driver and restart it still says Riva 128.

BTW I have to change the drivers in safe mode becuz i cant boot w/ that graphics card in a normal mode.

Any ideas on how to get this driver changed to the MX 420???

Thanks

Nathan Bjork · 04-26-2004, 09:34 PM

Ok, well I installed the old one and started it up in normal mode and tryed installing the MX420 driver, it said I needed to insert a disc. and so I just gave up and installed the old card again and now I cant get my display to go back up to 256colors and a 1024 res. like it used to.

Any Ideas at all?

Thanks

Steve Berger · 04-26-2004, 10:01 PM

It might be a little late now but the usual suggestion on changing is to switch to standard VGA (update driver) while the old card is still in. Then change cards and point to the location that you put the downloaded drivers into (or direct any wizard that pops up to that location) when updating driver. Sometimes the download will be an installer and all you need to do is run it. It might be necessary to find the inf file for the old and new card and delete them from the hidden directory , while in standard VGA mode , located within the Windows directory. When Windows installs drivers it starts with the inf there and doesn't give you the chance to select the right ones.

Make sure you check the monitor tab in display properties since it won't matter what drivers you have if Windows thinks you have a 640x480 monitor connected.

It can take some drastic steps to correct a misinstallation and unless you are good at editing the registry you might end up reinstalling Windows. Sorry I can't be of more help but a technical forum might be more helpfull in this case.

Nathan Bjork · 04-26-2004, 10:39 PM

Ok, thanks Steve. I started my comp w/ the old card, changed it to Standard VGA and put my new card in and switched it to the GeForce 4 like I wanted and it still wont boot, so i installed the old card again and booted and then changed back to the nvidia vanta like the recommened thing says. So now I am trying to use the old card and just go back to what i had before. So I have all the settings back to normal and when I try to change my res to 1024 (from 640 16 colors) it starts to restart then goes to a black screen with a binking light. I have to shut it down and when it restarts its back at 640. If I cant get it to work ill have to get some CD-Rs and back everything up then reformat the harddrive and start from scratch.

One more Q, if I reformat my harddrive with the new card in there, will that work or will it make it worst?

Thanks again

MikeFR · 04-27-2004, 02:19 PM

You might want to try getting a driver through windows update.

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Nathan Bjork · 04-27-2004, 07:36 PM

Nothing seems to be going right for me. My computer freezes when I try to run system recovery, and the screen res is stuck on 640 no matter what driver I have set it on. Whether it is the recomned driver, the Riva TNT2 64, like it says on the card or a standard vga driver. When I try changing the settings to 800 or 1024 it will ask to restart then it will restart and the windows 98 screen will come up then is will have a black sreen with a blinking white dot up in the top left corner, that never goes away. So then I shut it down and it asks me to go. So I go into safe mode, and that does nothing, so I go into normal mode and it says the display properties are messed up and so i try to change the dispay properties come up again and so i change it to 1024 and it does everything all over again, so I hit cancel and it starts up 640.

Can anybody help me change the settings back to 1024 or get the recovery to work,

Thanks everyone

Dan Mercier · 04-27-2004, 07:54 PM

Have you actually removed the old adapters from device manager?

I had problems switching cards a while back and it turned out
that all I had to do was go into device manager and say remove device. Windows automatically put in a basic adapter and removed the old drivers. Then I started from scratch installing drivers.

I don't know if that will help but you could have multiple drivers conflicting right now.

Nathan Bjork · 04-27-2004, 08:26 PM

Thanks for the response Dan. I opend up deviece manager and there was like 10 monitor drivers (about 3 diff ones) with the "!" in the middle of them. I removed all of them. Now what should I install for a driver, the recommend driver which is a nvidia vanta, or the driver that says exacly what the card says, which is a nvidia TNT2 64, or a standard driver? And no I dont remember what I used to have.

Thanks again

SteveCop · 04-28-2004, 08:01 AM

Nathan,
Download the Nvidia drivers (Win 9x) for your card here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/win9x_archive.html
These are the correct drivers for the MX 420. Choose the latest, or one of the others. I have not tried the latest version, so I have no opinion on it.
If you still have problems, you may need to use a driver cleaner to remove all traces of the old driver(s) before installing the new one.
A driver cleaner can be downloaded here:
http://www.driverheaven.net/cleaner/

Per Nvidia:
* "Download Accelerator" utilities should be disabled when downloading any drivers.
* Do not run virus protection software in the background while installing the drivers. This prevents the driver from configuring itself properly.
* Before installing new drivers make sure you uninstall all NVIDIA display drivers from the Windows Control Panel. Browse to the Start Menu > Windows Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs and search for "NVIDIA Windows Display Drivers" or "NVIDIA Display Drivers" and select remove."

Steve