ATI 128 +a7a266 driver setup.. impossible?

[Philisoft]

As many of you know, the a7a266 has a problem with ATI's rage 128 series. ATI has apparently released a driver that solves the problem. Here's a quick rundown of the situation:

On A7a266 boards, one cannot boot into windows because after teh scandisk area of the startup process and before the desktop loads (and sometimes immediatley after a few of the icons load) the system will hang. This is because of ATI's chipset in the rage 128 pro, because my system runs fine with a Geforce and an older ATI 8MB card.

Now, they suggest that you install their new drivers, located here for reference:
http://support.ati.com/drivers/win2k/win2k_r128_513013209_sp.html

Anyway, my problem is, how on earth is someone supposed to install the drivers? You have to BE in the operating system to install them, do you not, since their install program is a win32 executable? The install program will not install the drivers unless their ATI card is in the AGP slot, but the only way I can boot is to have a different card in there, right now a geforce2. This is some garbage. Unless I'm missing something, there is no possible way to have the operating system get at those drivers. I've tried just trying to boot into the system anyway I can just to run the driver setup program, but nothing works due to the a7a and rage conflict; normal, safemode and vga mode DO NOT WORK, all hanging in the same place. I'm sure ATI has worked up some great solution, but I was wondering how its supposed to be implemented? Perhaps I'm the only one out there with this problem, but I do not see how to install the drivers without first mysteriously getting into the operating system (in my case windows 2000) - sort of the chicken and egg problem, one has to come first, yet neither can without the other...

Also, I tried to use the recovery console after booting from the setup CD to see if the driver setup program would run in 16 bit dos mode or whatever the recovery console is, but I couldn't execute programs from that promt (great "recovery" utility..)

Any suggestions? Any kind of help would be appreciated. Perhaps we can finally get this pesterous problem stomped.

-Phil Crosby
http://www.philisoft.com
http://www.graphics-design.com

 

[Crashman]

If your having problems in Safe mode, or with the card listed as a PCI compatable display adapter, then it's not a driver issue. Are you overclocking? Running AGP4x? Running with AGP fastwrites enabled? The Rage 128 pro cannot take an moderately overclocked AGP bus, is only AGP2x, and does not support Fast Writes. All these things MUST be disabled in BIOS. Your card MUST be installed as the default PCI compatable display adapter before you can install the new driver.

Video killed my Radio Card!

 

[Philisoft]

Heheh when I first got this motherboard I could not get into my computer because of the abvoe problem, so yes i tried every bios setting possible. I've tried running the processor at 900mhz and toggled all agp and pci options that I could, and tried them. It's an AGP card BTW, running at 2x as of right now.

Thanks for the suggestions though; BTW I have the lattest bios revision (1004) and the most updated ali magic AGP drivers. I can boot into safe mode/normal with 2 other graphics cards, just not this one, which has a known error with A7A266's. I thought the problem extended into safe mode, but the post above me says that it shouldn't...?

-Phil Crosby
http://www.philisoft.com
http://www.graphics-design.com

 

[Crashman]

Yes, safe mode should not be affected, because the video driver is not loaded in safe mode. You could continue to have problems even in safe mode if the AGP clock rate was pushed too far, caused by overclocking between 100 and 133 (usually above 115), or overclocking above 133 (usually above 145). 100 and 133 would give you stock AGP clock.

Video killed my Radio Card!