Booting a system with no video

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The system I have listed below doesn't have Onboard Video, but I had to get AGP 8X Video Card for it. The system BIOS will detect the card and give you a VGA appearance 640x480 8 to 16-bit color. Once you install the Windows drivers then you're new Video Card will come to life..
 
What if you had no video card though, would it be able to display anything with no video whatsoever? or will it just be stuck at the 640x480 8 to 16-bit color
 
Well, if you have no onboard video and no video card, there's no place to connect your monitor, there's no graphics engine, so no.

If there's a graphics port on the back of your motherboard, that means that you have onboard graphics, it's like a video card built into your motherboard. Onboard graphics are often not extremely high quality though.
 
Actually, you CAN setup a system for this purpose, but you'll need a video card to temporarily set it up for this purpose.

The techie term for this is a "headless" system... as it has no "head" (or monitor). Many modern BIOS's allow for post/boot without a videocard. You just have to set them up this way IN the BIOS for no halt on error and no videocard... then remove the videocard needed to set this up.

I've had to do just this with some older hardware for the purpose of making headless, dual-homed servers running non-Microsoft operating systems (BSD/Linux based). In these situations, attaching ssh over the network or XDM network x-desktops is sufficient for administrating the server and hosting client applications.

So, the short answer is- hunt in your BIOS to see if you can disable halts on errors and no video option.
 
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