Nvidia card trouble, cd rom problem

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spkenny

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Ok, got this system from a friend, needed a simple reformat. It's a Dell Dimension 8300. 2 questions I have, first, why will it not boot up past the post screens unless both cd roms are hooked up? One of his roms was bad, so I disconnected it, and set the good one for master. Upon rebooting, it said it couldnt find secondary master, or slave devices, and wouldnt allow me to go any further except for setup. So to make sure the second one wasnt also bad, I connected 2 cd roms of my own that I knew were in perfectly working order. But still, 2 cd drives had to be hooked up for it just to function properly. Something in the bios setup? Now onto the more pressing issue, which would be my second question. I had reinstalled windows Home onto this system successfully, all the drivers off of the original installation disc that came with the machine. However, upon rebooting, it would get past the Winxp logo, then freeze up. Nothing came up message wise for errors, until after rebooting about 3 or 4 times. This error message popped up:

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer. The problem seems to be caused by the following file: nv4_disp
The device driver got stuck in an infinite loop. This usually indicates a problem with the device itself, or with the divice driver programming the hardware incorrectly.

Technical Information: *** STOP: 0x000000EA (0x8215FDA8, 0x81F00518, 0xF8975CBC, 0x00000001)

Obviously a video error of some kind, as I had noticed the screen resetting itself constantly configuration-wise, upon the inital install. I went to the dell site and downloaded the latest driver for the video card, only to run into the same results. Should I try a different AGP video card in the slot?
 
2 questions I have, first, why will it not boot up past the post screens unless both cd roms are hooked up? One of his roms was bad, so I disconnected it, and set the good one for master. Upon rebooting, it said it couldnt find secondary master, or slave devices, and wouldnt allow me to go any further except for setup. So to make sure the second one wasnt also bad, I connected 2 cd roms of my own that I knew were in perfectly working order. But still, 2 cd drives had to be hooked up for it just to function properly.

Head into the BIOS and make sure the settings under "Drive Configuration" match the hardware configuration you desire.

The NVidia drivers listed on Dell's web site are out of date. These are the up to date drivers for the NVidia based cards that the Dimension 8300 is listed to have been manufactured with (I don't know what card is in your system because you didn't specify).

NVidia GeForce FX 5200 128MB DDR Drivers
NVidia GeForce4 MX 64MB DDR Drivers


Download the appropriate drivers for your video card on another PC and put them on a flash drive or burn them to CD/DVD.

Try to boot into Safe Mode and attempt the following (if Safe Mode hangs on you with the problematic video card installed, try replacing your video card with another one for the following steps):

Once you have successfully booted into Safe Mode, uninstall the drivers for the problematic video card in the Device Manager. If you had to swap cards earlier, shut down your PC and switch them back at this time. If you didn't have to swap cards simply reboot (into Safe Mode again). Install the new video card drivers. Reboot again and let Windows attempt to boot normally.

I hope this works, post back with your results or questions :).
 
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