A7N8X Deluxe XP Boot Problem

[rheostat]

first off:

asus a7n8x deluxe v2.0 bios 1006
amd athlon/barton 2800+
msi gf4 4200
120 gb seagate sata hdd
120 gb wd ide hdd
1gb samsung 3200 ddram (running at 166)
400w power supply

where to begin...

i guess it all started when my screen went black for a second, and then back to the desktop. i thought it kind of odd but went back to doing whatever i was doing. it kept flashing randomly over the next week, gradually becoming more recurrent. then one day it flashed, my desktop was garbled and the system had hung hard. rebooted and everything was still garbled. now it won't even boot into windows. it gets to the 'windows is loading' screen and loads for a bit, and then the screen goes black while it tries to load, and then either the monitor turns off or i get a garbled mess on the screen. booting into safe mode and uninstalling the geforce from the device manager lets me boot normally, but then as soon as xp installs the drivers it goes back to the way it was on next boot. tried multiple monitors, no change. put the geforce in my athlon 950 computer and it works like a charm. the card seems to be fine. put my radeon 64mb ddr in the a7n8x and no problems at all. i've tried formatting, old detonators, new detonators, pre-nforce drivers and post-nforce drivers, pre-sp1, post-sp1, almost everything i can think of. i suppose i could just leave the radeon in the a7n8x but i bought the gf4 for gaming and it's really pissing me off. bought the a7n8x months ago and it worked fine until now. please please please let me get my computer working again.

[Telexen]

Since you said you put a Radeon in and it worked fine, it sounds like the video card has gone bad. Try putting your GF4 into another computer and testing it ... if it has problems on another machine then you know it's bad.

[rheostat]

i put it into a different computer (asus mobo and athlon 950 cpu). the card worked fine. installed detonator drivers and it still worked fine. this makes me think its some kind of conflict with something in the other computer, but honestly, i have no idea.

[DallasDon]

did you try uninstalling the radeon in the device manager of windows,

Shut down

Boot the gforce card with windows drivers,, then load the gforce drivers?

Sounds like a driver conflict.

[rheostat]

DallasDon: no luck. i installed the radeon, let xp install the drivers, rebooted, rebooted again into safe mode, uninstalled the radeon, shut down, installed the geforce, booted up and the monitor turned off. maybe my computer has an ati fetish and won't work with a nvidia card