The war with "VGASAVE" and "Standard VGA Driver"

  • Thread starter Thread starter Weldon Wallick
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Weldon Wallick

Has anyone solved the somewhat common problem of getting the message
to use "standard vga drivers" when trying to install a Radeon board?

"Standard vga drivers" are not available and "vgasave" is in full
control.

I'm trying to install a 9200 Radeon with no success.

I updated the BIOS and the mobo drivers

I have tried various versions of Radeon drivers.
 
Users know that to speed things up in Windows 2000 and XP, you can stop services and disable them. Fewer services running equals
faster performance. Both operating systems contain a service named VGASAVE, which is designed to load automatically when the default
designated video card driver does not work, or if a newly installed video card driver refuses to work -- this should stay off-limits
to disablers.

VGASAVE is enabled by default and should not be disabled. If you disable it and reboot, there is a strong chance the system may not
boot, since during boot-time it is used as a fail-safe. Many users have reported that they disabled it in the mistaken assumption
they were freeing up system resources by doing so, only to discover their system was now unbootable. If VGASAVE was disabled, you
can reset it by booting to the Recovery Console and typing enable vgasave service_system_start at the command prompt.

VGASAVE consists of two files, VGA.DLL and VGA.SYS, both of which must be present for the service to work correctly. In the event
one or both of these files is deleted or damaged, Windows 2000 will BSOD and return the following error: STOP B4 error,
VIDEO_DRIVER_FAILED_TO_LOAD. You can recover these files by booting to the Recovery Console and expanding copies of VGA.DLL and
VGA.SYS from the i386 directory on the CD-ROM (stored as VGA.SY_ and VGA.DR_).

that being said

what are you starting out with? Radeon is recognized off the git go?
 
Has anyone solved the somewhat common problem of getting the message
to use "standard vga drivers" when trying to install a Radeon board?

"Standard vga drivers" are not available and "vgasave" is in full
control.
Click to expand...

I had exactly the same problem about half a year ago. I also tried
everything including various reg hacks but to no avail. At last I had to do
a recovery installation of my W2K box. I hope you will have more luck.

Cheers, Chris
 
I had exactly the same problem about half a year ago. I also tried
everything including various reg hacks but to no avail. At last I had to do
a recovery installation of my W2K box. I hope you will have more luck.

Cheers, Chris
Click to expand...

Well, I am now thinking in terms of getting an Nvidia board and
chucking the Radeon. Since my machine has never "seen" Nvidia maybe it
would go ahead and install.

What do you mean by "recovery installation"? Would that be a repair
installation?
 
Well, I am now thinking in terms of getting an Nvidia board and
chucking the Radeon. Since my machine has never "seen" Nvidia maybe it
would go ahead and install.

What do you mean by "recovery installation"? Would that be a repair
installation?
Click to expand...

Yeah, I meant a repair installation. It might be possible to repair this
issue with the installation of another video card. But to play save I would
borrow even an older card an try it. It could happen to be a Windows bug and
even another card brand could refuse to install.
I was very angry when this happened but I never thought to ditch my Radeon
9800 Pro for anything else.

Good luck!
Chris
 
Yeah, I meant a repair installation. It might be possible to repair this
issue with the installation of another video card. But to play save I would
borrow even an older card an try it. It could happen to be a Windows bug and
even another card brand could refuse to install.
I was very angry when this happened but I never thought to ditch my Radeon
9800 Pro for anything else.

Good luck!
Chris
Click to expand...


I ran into the same situation on my brothers Soltek Nforce 2 board. In
that case what i did was to delete the AGP to PCI system device out of
device manager, reinstall the nforce drivers and reboot. Upon
rebooting, 2000 then discovered a new video device and i was able to
successfully install the 9800pro. Took a while to figure out but that
device's registry entries had gotten corrupted. His works great now.
 
Has anyone solved the somewhat common problem of getting the message
to use "standard vga drivers" when trying to install a Radeon board?
Click to expand...
I had a similar problem caused by an ATI????.DLL that could not be deleted.
I posted this fix nearly two years ago:

It took many hours but I finally got the new 3286 WinXP 8500 drivers
installed. I kept getting error message "Install VGA Drivers First" and
sometimes a file could not be copied. I did something like this:

1. Start XP in Safe Mode by holding F8 key at boot start.
2. Disable "Radeon 8500" driver in Device Manager. Do not re-start.
3. From Add/Remove programs, uninstall ATI Video Drivers. Do not
re-start.
4. Open C:\Windows\System32 and delete ATI*.*. There is a Ati???.dll
that
is causing problem as cannot be deleted normally.
5. Try "Setup" for 3286 drivers but will still fail.
6. At Device Manager, select Radeon 8500 and select "Update Driver".
7. Select "Install from list or specific location".
8. Select "Don't search, I will select driver to install"
9. Pick Radeon 8500/Radeon 8500LE (Not Radeon 8500).
10. Celebrate!!

Let me know if this works for you.

-Kent
 
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