Help: Video card disabled monitor screen blank

[sir_nigel]

hardware: sony VAIO rz40c1b with radeon 9800 pro card.

windows xp says we have two video cards a radeon 9200 for primary and a radeon 9800 for secondary.

From windows we disabled the 9200 then rebooted.

we see video on bios and startup stuff but when we get to the windows log on screen we see a blank screen. The pc is running and booted up but no display.

Tried booting in safe mode but same result.

We are blind :dead: any ideas?

 

[ChineseTechie]

Since you disabled the 9200, then I suppose the monitor is plugged into the 9800. And I'll also make the assumption that you have installed the necessary drivers for the 9800. Is the 9200 an intergrated video card?? If not, why would you have two?? Anyway, have you tried plugging the monitor back into the 9200?? Do you see anything??

cT

 

[sir_nigel]

Thank you for your reply ...

we only have a 9800 card i.e. only one monitor port.
but windows said we had both a 9200 and a 9800. We know this is not the case. Do not know why windows said we also had a 9200. (we were having problems with games not working so we stupidly tried to disable the 9200 in hopes the games would only see the 9800 and use that)

We just need to figure out how to get video to work in windows again.
We cant see what is going on with the pc in windows mode so we can't change any widows settings.

Thanks again.

 

[ChineseTechie]

Try plugging the 9200 back in and see if you get anything. Seems like your computer is still looking for the 9200. Before you try the 9800, you should clean out the 9200 drivers. See the link below to see how.

https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic25930.html

 

[sir_nigel]

...umm sorry CT but I cannot try the stuff on the link because it requires doing things in windows which I cannot do until I can see again by getting video to work in windows mode...

Still need help with this if CT or anyone can give me a bios or a hardware fix would really appreciate that!

Thanks!

 

[ChineseTechie]

ok... but first of all, does it work when you plug back in the 9200??

cT

 

[sir_nigel]

CT we don't have a 9200. Windows XP just thought we did. We were, and still are, and always have been, plugged into the 9800.
Sorry I didn't tell you that the change we made to make this mess was a software change only.

One other update is that when we boot in safe mode the machine does not ever get to windows. It locks up after a few screen fulls of DOS looking path names and files.

(By the way thanks for trying to help us!)

 

[ChineseTechie]

^___^ you are very welcome. I got help from here and I"m just giving back by help others.

What heppened before you have the 9800?? Did you get it with the VAIO?? Or you have the VAIO and you want to upgrade your video card to 9800??

People who are trying to help, including me, need to know in detail what had happened that leads you to the problem. If you can't describe it, it's really hard for us to help you. What we need to know is like, what you had before, what are you trying to achieve, etc.

cT

 

[sir_nigel]

The VAIO came with the 9800 we have never changed the video card. The only hardware changes were to add another hard drive. We think that some how some of our gaming software or a free-ware dvd player may have reconfigured the software settings and/or drivers.
We were trying to get some of the gaming software (Lock-on, Madden NFL, Forgotten-battles) to work when we tried this error of deleting,"that is disabled" the 9200 . The gaming software used to work on this machine but quit about 6-8 months ago.

 

[ChineseTechie]

Then where did the 9200 driver comes from??

cT

 

[sir_nigel]

CT your question is a good one. But, we do not know where the windows came up with the phantom 9200.
We just thought that disabling the 9200 might make the games work. Of coures that just got us into the mess we are now in.

 

[sir_nigel]

We got the problem solved. Here is how my son did it:

I messed up the computer by disabling the graphics card(yeah really stupid...was trying to fix a problem that prevented my games from running), then proceeded to reboot. Then, you guessed it; nothing was on the screen when it was booted back up! So after hours of prayer and guesswork and lots of clicking/button pushing with almost no earthly idea of what I was doing, I got up this morning and did this:

*pressed the little-known 'start' button on the keyboard(between the left-side Ctrl and Alt)

*pressed the R key (for Run programs)

*typed 'narrator' then pressed enter.

At this point, even though I couldn't see what I was doing, at least I could hear what was going on. So I just went through device manager etc. etc. and here we are...things are back to normal.​

That's how we solved the problem. :grinthumb

Thanks for your help. :wave:

Now we're back to trying to solve the original problem...