I’m really asleep at the wheel on this one ’cause I just can’t see a solution.
I have a Pentium III – 733 MHz on an ASUS CUV4X motherboard with 256 MB RAM. An ATI Rage 128 AGP video card has been providing my graphics while using Windows 98.
Over the weekend I upgraded to Windows 2000 Professional. However, the install process would stall at the latter stages of the installation. During the process where W2K was “detecting hardware such as keyboard, mouse, etc., it would stall at about the two-thirds complete stage. The screen would turn into the black system screen covered entirely with commas, and remain there, stuck in never-never land. By the way, this was a fresh and complete install after reformatting the hard drive. The same thing happened several times.
I started replacing components one by one – the monitor, the hard drive, the RAM, and then I replaced the AGP graphics card, but instead used an older PCI Diamond Stealth card. Hallelujah – Windows 2000 finally completed the installation!
Okay, I thought, I’ll just outsmart W2K, complete the installation with my Diamond PCI card and re-install the ATI Rage 128 AGP after the fact. WRONG – Even though Windows detected the new card (not by name/type), after the prompted reboot, the machine froze at the Loading Windows 2000 screen (the blue one with the W2K logo), and it looked like it was somewhat “melted”. (Well, it looked like it had melted, if you know what I mean.)
Okay, here’s the question, why in theheck won’t Windows 2000 Professional let me use my ATI Rage 128 AGP graphics card?
I’m awake, but….