Need a bit of advice... Basically I have this Win98 box, was running ATI drivers (for ArcadeVGA card), but wanted to reinstall them for various reasons.

Went to safe mode, switched to plain old VGA drivers. It was late, forget exactly what I did etc. But switched back to ATI again.

Now I get a garbled screen, I can tell Windows is working because I hear the audio responses to mouse activity etc. But there is just this garbled unchanging pattern on the screen.

Safe mode is fine. BIOS displays fine etc. I tried going to safe mode several times and switching to the plain VGA drivers, an it all proceeds normally. But it seems the system never truly switches. Just get that garbled crap at reset/reload.

Help. Please.

-Prophet-
www.retrogames.com

> Need a bit of advice... Basically I have this Win98 box, was running ATI drivers
> (for ArcadeVGA card), but wanted to reinstall them for various reasons.
>
> Went to safe mode, switched to plain old VGA drivers. It was late, forget
> exactly what I did etc. But switched back to ATI again.
>
> Now I get a garbled screen, I can tell Windows is working because I hear the
> audio responses to mouse activity etc. But there is just this garbled unchanging
> pattern on the screen.
>
> Safe mode is fine. BIOS displays fine etc. I tried going to safe mode several
> times and switching to the plain VGA drivers, an it all proceeds normally. But
> it seems the system never truly switches. Just get that garbled crap at
> reset/reload.

Did you uninstall the ATI video drivers, if not try that in safemode. Run scandisk to insure nothing got screwed up on the drive. Then try installing the drivers again.

>
> Help. Please.
>
> -Prophet-
> www.retrogames.com
>

> Did you uninstall the ATI video drivers, if not try that in safemode. Run
> scandisk to insure nothing got screwed up on the drive. Then try installing the
> drivers again.

Thanks, will give that a try!

I think I recall the system being unable to uninstall the ATI drivers properly for some reason. This was like 3AM so I wasn't really following carefully. ;) So hopefully scandisk can help there.

-Prophet-
www.retrogames.com

> > Did you uninstall the ATI video drivers, if not try that in safemode. Run
> > scandisk to insure nothing got screwed up on the drive. Then try installing
> the
> > drivers again.
>
> Thanks, will give that a try!
>
> I think I recall the system being unable to uninstall the ATI drivers properly
> for some reason. This was like 3AM so I wasn't really following carefully. ;) So
> hopefully scandisk can help there.
>
> -Prophet-
> www.retrogames.com
>

While the refresh rate could be a symptom the drivers are likely the cause. Some files or registry entrys are probably corrupted. I mean he can't even uninstall that's a pretty clear sign of corruption of some sort.

> While the refresh rate could be a symptom the drivers are likely the cause. Some
> files or registry entrys are probably corrupted. I mean he can't even uninstall
> that's a pretty clear sign of corruption of some sort.
>

That sucked...couldn't see the screen :-D