Is my video card dead?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Aloke Prasad
  • Start date Start date
A

Aloke Prasad

Windows XP Pro Sp2 won't boot, even into safe mode. The drivers load up
to AGP440.SYS and stops.

If I boot from the WinXP CD, the bootup stops after the drivers have
been loaded from the XP CD.

This is on a P4 3GHz 2 GB system with ATI 9800 Pro AIW AGP card.

Does this sound like hardware failure on the video card? Or could it be
bad memory on the motherboard?

Thanks in advance.

Aloke
 
Aloke said:
Windows XP Pro Sp2 won't boot, even into safe mode. The drivers load up
to AGP440.SYS and stops.

If I boot from the WinXP CD, the bootup stops after the drivers have
been loaded from the XP CD.

This is on a P4 3GHz 2 GB system with ATI 9800 Pro AIW AGP card.

Does this sound like hardware failure on the video card? Or could it be
bad memory on the motherboard?
Click to expand...

An easy way to differentiate software from hardware failures is to boot
a live cd, like Ubuntu. If you do not get the failures you see with
your Windows boot, you can be fairly confident that the problem lies
within Windows.

If you're seeing some video on startup, which apparently you are, it's
not a good conclusion to say that your video card is dead. In fact, I
wouldn't even bet heavily that there's any hardware fault with your
video card.

Bad memory is a possibility. The aforementioned live cd has an option
on the boot menu to run MemTest86+. That that run overnight to see if
any errors crop up. The description of your problem does not make me
suspect a memory fault either, but it's easy to gain some confidence
with MemTest.
 
Aloke Prasad said:
Windows XP Pro Sp2 won't boot, even into safe mode. The drivers load up
to AGP440.SYS and stops.

If I boot from the WinXP CD, the bootup stops after the drivers have been
loaded from the XP CD.

This is on a P4 3GHz 2 GB system with ATI 9800 Pro AIW AGP card.

Does this sound like hardware failure on the video card? Or could it be
bad memory on the motherboard?
Click to expand...

Sounds like a corrupt system file problem to me, but I don't understand the
problem when booting from the Windows CD. The Windows CD doesn't store
anything to the hard disk until you start an installation, so if it can't
even get that far, then there is a hardware problem of some sort with your
PC. If you have a picture, then the graphics card is obviously not totally
dead, but I have never encounted a graphics card that still worked (gave a
picture) after the memory failed!

I would suggect that you open the PC case and remove things to leave just
the CPU, 1 stick of RAM, the graphics card. Unplug the power cables to the
hard disk(s). Then try to boot on the Windows CD. If it gets further than
before, then the graphics card is OK and the problem is one of the removed
parts. Try swapping the stick of RAM for the other DIMM (assuming you have
2) and reboot and see what happens. If the computer hangs at the same point
every time, then I suspect the system RAM and CPU are probably fine and
there is a problem with the motherboard or the graphics card. However, if it
works with parts removed, then re-insert the components 1 at a time (with
the power off!) until you locate the problem.
 
Windows XP Pro Sp2 won't boot, even into safe mode. The drivers load up
to AGP440.SYS and stops.
Click to expand...

You gave us no history of this system. What is it, how long
had it worked previously, and what has changed since it
worked? If there was no hardware change it is probably a
windows update or other installed software change.

If I boot from the WinXP CD, the bootup stops after the drivers have
been loaded from the XP CD.
Click to expand...

Try disabling features in the bios including RAID and
removable drives (USB, and printers with memory card slots,
etc).

This is on a P4 3GHz 2 GB system with ATI 9800 Pro AIW AGP card.

Does this sound like hardware failure on the video card? Or could it be
bad memory on the motherboard?
Click to expand...

No it doesn't seem like a video card problem, assuming the
video card output is still looking ok. No it doesn't seem
like bad memory, but you could run memtest86+ for a few
hours if you like.

It's likely some kind of incompatibility of windows with the
present hardware or firmware. That you see an agp440.sys
file may not be relevant, if you wanted you could try
renaming that file so it can't even load it, if it crashes
on that it would be driver related not the video card itself
since it was working in vga mode during the bootup for you
to see the text message.

This is really a software, not hardware problem. Windows is
getting stuck because of a bug. You might be able to
slipstream more recent patches into a disc image and make a
new patched XP SP2+ CD, but otherwise you might Google
search for the name of your motherboard and XP booting
problems to see if anyone else has this problem, and try
updating your motherboard bios so long as the system seems
otherwise stable.
 
Thank you all for responding.

After many days of experimentation, I found that the problem was that I
had mapped drives to resources on my office network, which I was
connecting to via VPN.

So, when the VPN was disconnected, Windows was taking a looooong time to
figure out that those resources were not available.

What looked like a lockup would in fact clear up if I waited a long time
for Windows to time out after it retried and gave up trying to
connect/disconnect these mapped drives.

Aloke
 
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