Need to reinstall the graphic card driver after each reboot

  • Thread starter Thread starter Andrea
  • Start date Start date
A

Andrea

Hi all,

has anybody ever experienced this problem? Each time I reboot my
Windows XP Pro machine, the graphic card (nVidia TNT at the moment,
but I had exactly the same problem with Trident 3dImage 975) does not
get recognized and Windows defaults to the generic standard VGA
driver.
If I go to Control Panel -> Perf. & Mgmt. -> System -> Hardware ->
Device Manager the Display adapter appears as not recognized (yellow
circle with question mark).
If I then right-click on it and select "update driver" (Hardware
Update Wizard) , then "Install from a list or specific location", then
"Don't search, I will choose the driver to install", Windows shows me
the correct driver which I select (i.e. I don't have to click on "Have
Disk", it is already present in Windows) and install and everything
works great until next reboot.

So, the driver is obviously present among the default Windows drivers
and it obviously works: the problem seems to be that, for some reason,
when at boot Windows looks for the driver it looks in the wrong place.
Can anyone tell me:
a) where does WindowsXP look by default when it searches for a driver
at boot?
b) where are the driver (the one that WindowsXP shows me when I run
the Update Hardware Wizard as described above) physically located?

I was thinking that once I have these two information all I need to do
is copy the driver from b) to a) and that should fix the problem.
Or is it something more complicated, like maybe some service that
should be running and doesn't or something like that?

Thaks a lot in advance
/Andrea
 
Try this first.

Boot into Safe Mode, open Device Manager, remove ALL video card drivers you
find, reboot and see if Windows can now find and install the correct
drivers.
 
Jerry said:
Try this first.

Boot into Safe Mode, open Device Manager, remove ALL video card drivers you
find, reboot and see if Windows can now find and install the correct
drivers.
Click to expand...

Thanks Jerry, but could you be more specific? When I open Device
Manager I see the tree of devices and there, under Display Drivers, I
only see one card, that is the nVIDIA TNT2 Model 64. that is as far as
I know the correct card.

Now when you say remove ALL video card drivers, do you mean remove
(uninstall) that card? Or is there a more advanced way where I can
actually see ALL the drivers installed.
I must confess I am not very familiar with the way WIndows treats
drivers.
It looks as if it has a lot of drivers for a lot of different devices.
Are all those drivers *installed*? I mean, is it enough for the
physical files of the driver to be present on the disk to be
considered *installed*, or do they have to be copied in some specific
directories?

I have so far tried with three different cards, and I get the same
problem with all three of them. I don't know what else to try short of
reformatting the disk and reinstalling windows from scratch.

TIA
/Andrea
 
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