7900GT - Corrupt Display at boot

[c0d3r]

hi all... Please bear with me.. ill explain the situcatuion in detail.. :S

Ive been using the MS 7900GT vt2d 256MB for three+ years now w/o any hitch. The System Specs are:

MSI K8n Neo4 platinum
MSI 7900GT 256MB
AMD Athelon 3800+ x2
2x1GB Kingston ValueSelect

Now day before yesterday, there was a small power surge / fluctuation after which the pc restarted. Initially xp wudnt boot at all. But the main issue was that the Boot Screen showed box-hatched lines, which are removed whenever dos is running.

After many tries, w/o success to solve the issue (Reset my lcd settings, reset my bios, removed-reinserted the gfx card) I tried another gfx card (a quadro 3800+) and the display worked fine at boot, however xp still didnt load.

So today i put in a fresh installation, and it worked fine on both the cards (i tested both cards w/o any drivers installed first.) . It even worked on all resolutions my ,monitor suported. However as soon as i installed the drivers (182.50 for xp), it went blank, and did not return display. The lcd shows the green-led on, which means that its still getting data on the vga, but no video feed..

So i figured its the bios of the gfx card that might be the issue. I dnlded a copy of the bios from MVKTECH boards for the card, and reinstalled the bios using NVFLASH 5.7.

But even after that, the boot screen shows the same box hatched lines, and whenever i reinstall any drivers for the card, the screen goes blank.

My deduction is that the card is damaged such that the device is working however its features arnt :S.

MY QUESTION(S):
1- Shud i try flashing a different manufacturer bios?
2- Is the card damaged beyond repair or is there still SOME way to recover that?

Please help me as i dont want to loose this card :S

 

[jitpublisher]

It is unfortunately showing the symptoms of a card that is dying.
Artifacts on boot up generally mean your GPU is toast, especially if another card will boot and work fine. You said you had a power surge, there MAY be damage to your power supply, and it is undervolting your 7900....but artifacts at bootup are just not a good omen for the card.

 

[c0d3r]

Ok, even after trying everything in the book, i still cant get this to work. The strangest thing is that If there are no Nvidia drivers isnstalled, its all good and ok, but once the drivers are installed, the screen blanks out (like it cant output the image, however, it still is giving data to the sccreen).
Ive flashed the vga bios and stuff, but to no avail :S.. here are a few pics of the screen...

Boot Screen shows Linear lines:

Nothing on the os menu (ie DOS..)

Windows Boot Screen :S

XP fine w/o any drivers installed :S

PLEASE help :S

 

[Maziar]

i some how agree with jitpublisher,that power surge may have damaged your card.
Cant u install any drivers?i mean even older drivers?
also does it come up with ubuntu ?

 

[Mousemonkey]

I had a similar issue once and found that if I swapped DVI ports and then booted up I could not see the boot sequence but it was fine once it got into windows.