Emachines new graphics card, now black screen, no POST, no BIOS

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Hello,
I have an emachines 370 with the Trigem IM845GL motherboard and Windows XP Home SP2 installed. This has the onboard graphics chipset (Intel 82845GL graphics memory controller hub). I recently installed an ATI Radeon 9250 PCI graphics card to get better graphics performance. This achieved the performance increase I needed, but after installing the new card, the system consistently took about 3-4 minutes to boot up and be useable after going through POST. There was also the same delay when using the "switch user" function.

I thought this delay might be caused by some internal conflict between the new ATI card and the motherboard onboard graphics. So I tried at first disabling and then uninstalling the onboard graphics through Device Manager/Display adapters, leaving the ATI card as the only adapter. On restarting, everything worked OK, but I still got the same slow boot problem as before.

Next step was to check the BIOS settings. This is a Phoenix BIOS. Under the "Advanced" menu, there is an option to set the primary video adpter to "PCI" or "Onboard". When I had initially installed the ATI card (i.e. before uninstalling the onboard graphics), I changed this to "PCI", but subsequently found that setting to this or "Onboard" didn't affect the signal output through the ATI card. So, after uninstalling the onboard graphics (probably foolishly), I tried changing the the setting back to "Onboard", saved settings, and restarted.

Result - system powers on but will not now go through POST and the screen stays black. Since there is no video output, I can't even get into the BIOS. If I switch the monitor lead back to the old onboard graphics socket, I get an error message warning to effect that the graphics controller cannot be reverse engineered, together with a few coloured flashing symbols. This seems to be a default message put out by the onboard grahics chipset indicating it has power but is not communicating with the operating system.

It seems to me I've shot myself in the foot. I think what I've done is delete/uninstall the onboard graphics controller but tell the BIOS to use it and not the ATI card, with the result that on startup the BIOS looks for the onboard graphics, can't find it, doesn't know to look for the ATI card, so then stops starting up. Trouble is, I can't get into the BIOS to change the settings.

Can anyone offer a solution to this? The only things I can think of doing are:

1)Physically remove and replace the ATI card, hoping this will force it to be recognised as the primary video adapter during POST.

2) Clear the CMOS via the motherboard jumpers to reset to default settings - but not sure what this will do.

3) Most drastic - install a new motherboard, keeping all my other components (CPU, HD, etc). But then I would also need to reinstall the whole OS from scratch, and I don't have a full copy of XP, so not the cheapest option.

any help/advice would be much appreciated,

thanks
Tony
 
Start by resetting the cmos. This will reset the bios to the default settings.

Remove the new card from the machine. Hopefully your computer will now boot up ok, using the onboard graphics.

Is your psu putting out enough power for your new graphics card?

Regards Howard :)
 
i need help and this does not give me all i need

hi i have same problem but one thing diffrent, i have 3 diffrent agp cards and moniter still wont come up, i have a ms 6340 and it has not onboard port. i cant get in to the bios or boot from disk so i cant install drivers i have looked around and still cant find the answer hoping you could,

thanks,
graeme
 
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