Video Card Install, What am I missing?

[ashardin]

I have a no-name computer with on board video and last night I tried to install a PCI Radeon 7000.  I'm using this computer for my vertical mame cab project and the Radeon's hardware rotation is key to this project.

I've done video card installs in the past and have never run into this issue, and I bet I'm missing something dumb but I've been left scratching my head.

So the computer had been using the on board video, so after installing the new PCI card I booted windows XP the normal way (on the on board card), intsalled the Radeon drivers and rebooted.  During reboot I switched the monitor cable to the new card and all was good in startup and the windows screen, then it went blank once in windows.  There was nothing when I switched to the on board card either because it had been disabled.

Well, I figured that something in the drivers was boogering it all up and I was planning a fresh XP install anyway so I figured what the hell, flatten and rebuild.  Everything worked fine during the install process but once it was loaded and into windows, blank, nothing.

I reloaded into Window's Safe Mode and got video in windows but could not install any drivers since it could not recongnize the video card as no drivers were loaded SINCE IT IS SAFE MODE.

What am I missing here?  Its pretty difficult to install any windows drivers with no video, and I'm not getting anything from the on board graphics either now.  In the BIOS it recognizes PCI as the primary graphics adapter so I'm just plain stumped. 

Any thoughts?

[eccs19]

I have a no-name computer with on board video and last night I tried to install a PCI Radeon 7000.

[TravistyOJ]

I have had these exact problems tons of times, installing a PCI video card on a computer with onboard video is annoying, because windows gets so confused.  A couple more things to try.

1. Check your BIOS settings. Sometimes you can completely disable the on board video through an option.

2.  Sometimes Ive found this order to be useful.  Boot up with monitor plugged into on board video, install drivers, then remove the drivers for on board video, then reboot with PCI video card.  Hope this helps, good luck

[Nailz]

Travisty hit it on the head with his first one, you need to disable the onboard video in BIOS, once that is done, you're golden....

[SteveJ34]

Travisty hit it on the head with his first one, you need to disable the onboard video in BIOS, once that is done, you're golden....

Or depending on the motherboard, it may have an appropriate jumper that needs to be moved.

Best of luck.