P4P800SE and BIOS - pages too small

  • Thread starter Thread starter PL
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PL

Just put the PC together. Everything is fine except that when I press
delete to enter the BIOS, instead of a full screen page, I get a row of
6 pages across the bottom quarter of the screen. The pages are far too
small to be legible!

If I bypass the BIOS, WinXP starts up normally with full-screen.

Does anyone know what's going on please?
 
what is your display, lcd or crt ? If lcd, is it digital or analog ?
onboard video or agp card, what type ?
These points may assist in solving the problem...but a quick guess
would indicate a display problem or something is wrong with the bios.
You could try flashing it if the monitor has worked with a previous
system...
 
can you set your display with the monitor controls if you can set it to
640x480 at 60 hertz.
then boot to bios.
if your monitor is digital you may have to connect it to the analog output
for bios.
 
timmy wrote:
what is your display, lcd or crt ? If lcd, is it digital or analog ?
onboard video or agp card, what type ?
These points may assist in solving the problem...but a quick guess
would indicate a display problem or something is wrong with the bios.
You could try flashing it if the monitor has worked with a previous
system...
Click to expand...
I've now spent two days on this issue.
My spec:

Gigabyte GD1703DP 17"LCD with both digital and analogue input
Matrox Parhelia 128Mb AGP
ASUS P4P800SE with 1GB PC2700 DDR
NEC PCI USB

The problems:
With DVI input to the LCD, no signal to the monitor, which stays blank.
Doesn't even power up to allow me to access the monitor on-screen menu
to select digital input.

With analogue input to the LCD, there's about 3 seconds of hard disk
activity before the PC stops, with no signal to the monitor. After two
or three re-sets, the PC will boot to WinXP and work happily. BUT, on
start-up, the Dos message 'hit delete to enter setup' appears 9 times in
a horizontal line across the bottom of the screen. If I hit delete,
then the bios page appears in those same 9 boxes across the bottom of
the screen. These images are so small, I can't read anything. What is
curious is that Asus backgroung logo is just the one, normal size image.

When I substitute the Matrox with an ATI 7500SE 64Mb AGP display
adapter, then all screen images are correct.

(At the moment the PC is running with the Matrox, but as I sit here
preparing this post on my Notebook, the PC presents the following error
message 'Generic Host Process for Win32 services has encountered a
problem and must close).

I'm using the latest bios and drivers for both the Matrox display
adapter and the ASUS mainboard. I've searched both ASUS and Matrox tech
forums with much success.

I could now do with some help/advise from you fellas.
 
It sounds like you've isolated the video card as the problem. Does the
same issue occur when you have a "crt" connected to the system with
the matrox card ? Can you test another brand of "lcd" with the matrox
card ? (2 more tests to try...heh).
It may be a specific issue between the matrox card and that brand of
lcd or possibly just that card with any lcd...Most newer lcd's have a
native resolution at which they are "recommended" to display at. But
for some reason your vesa (vga) display mode(matrox) appears to be
placing an incompatible request to the lcd...
Quite simply put, the video card may be too old...at least for a newer
lcd display...
Just to rule out another possibility, try to test the memory on the
matrox card, preferrably once you've connected to and successfully
booted with a crt attached. There should be some dos utilities from
matrox for this task, or I think you can even run some "debug" command
with a switch or 2...trying to dig back in my memory with this one...
 
PL <"neatripple AT said:
I've now spent two days on this issue.
My spec:

Gigabyte GD1703DP 17"LCD with both digital and analogue input
Matrox Parhelia 128Mb AGP
ASUS P4P800SE with 1GB PC2700 DDR
NEC PCI USB

The problems:
With DVI input to the LCD, no signal to the monitor, which stays blank.
Doesn't even power up to allow me to access the monitor on-screen menu
to select digital input.

With analogue input to the LCD, there's about 3 seconds of hard disk
activity before the PC stops, with no signal to the monitor. After two
or three re-sets, the PC will boot to WinXP and work happily. BUT, on
start-up, the Dos message 'hit delete to enter setup' appears 9 times in
a horizontal line across the bottom of the screen. If I hit delete,
then the bios page appears in those same 9 boxes across the bottom of
the screen. These images are so small, I can't read anything. What is
curious is that Asus backgroung logo is just the one, normal size image.

When I substitute the Matrox with an ATI 7500SE 64Mb AGP display
adapter, then all screen images are correct.

(At the moment the PC is running with the Matrox, but as I sit here
preparing this post on my Notebook, the PC presents the following error
message 'Generic Host Process for Win32 services has encountered a
problem and must close).

I'm using the latest bios and drivers for both the Matrox display
adapter and the ASUS mainboard. I've searched both ASUS and Matrox tech
forums with much success.

I could now do with some help/advise from you fellas.
Click to expand...

I would try to get the help of the Matrox support staff.
The Matrox support staff work the forums, between 9am-5pm
M-F in the same time zone as Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is
possible they'll have a new video BIOS for the Matrox
video card or some other kind of fix, that will correct any
VESA issues the card might have. The hardest part, will be
describing the problem in a way that the support staff can
understand (so read the forums in advance, to get some idea
of how people describe such a problem).

http://forum.matrox.com/mga/

I cannot tell from the initial problem description, whether this
thread is describing the same issues or not. It does sound like
a VESA mode problem, but your description of the screen appearance
is unlike anything I've ever read before.

http://forum.matrox.com/mga/viewtopic.php?t=7116&highlight=vesa+modes

http://groups.google.ca/group/alt.c..._frm/thread/229f34b5795e194c/a7dc2e2f101a91dc

There are some files here, but you may want to get some assistance
from Matrox, especially if you don't have a PCI video card
available for emergencies.

http://www.matrox.com/mga/support/drivers/bios/home2.cfm

http://forum.matrox.com/mga/viewtopic.php?t=14395&highlight=systemlogofix

I don't know if the Matrox support staff have email addresses,
but if you cannot succeed in explaining what you are seeing,
if you have a digital camera, perhaps you could take a picture
of the screen and send it to Matrox. While is is more likely
a disagreement about VESA modes, it could be the card is bad.

Paul
 
Which video card are you using. If it's a Matrox, there is a VGA
compatibility problem. Both ASUS and Matrox sites deal with it and provide
fixes/workarounds.
 
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