[RESOLVED] Diamond Stealth 3 driver problem

[sim]

heres the deal
after a fresh format and install of windows 98se, my friend install the video driver(before the mainboard driver) and it gave him a blue screen of death on the next boot and every time after that. he could only get in on safe mode, so they called me. I re-installed the driver, tried the one for win 95 and a couple other things and now when it boots it looks like it takes the left 1/8 of the desktop and doubled it across the screen and the whole picture is blurred alot. to try and solve this problem i went into msconfig and narrowed it down to the boot folder in system.ini a line that says: display.drv=pnpdrvr.drv
when I disable this it boots fine into windows but the colors cannot be changed past 16. the other options are still there but when it restarts the change does not take effect. right now I have it disabled so they can do basic things. by the way after i uninstalled the original video driver I loaded all the drivers.
any help is appreciated.

[Warp Hunter]

If you can give me a break down of the other hardware in the system I might be able to give you a better idea of how to fix the problem....I usually find that most mainboards require that all of the drivers are installed for them first...I have a format that I follow when redoing the software on a system for a wipe and clean install...

Install Windows with just the basics in the system, just your mainboard and all of it's goodies, your cd drive, hard drive and floppy drive obviously and your video card. Everything else can be installed after you get the system stable. When it comes to the drivers always install the mainboard drivers first. I can't stress this one enough. Then install your vid card drivers. Once you're certain that your system is running stably then install your other components one at a time. that's all there really is to it.

In this case your best bet may be to format the drive, after backing anything you need up and doing a totally fresh and clean reinstall.

And just as a note I'm not trying to put down the way that anyone sets up a system. Everyone has a method that works for them. I'm just letting you know what mine is.

Hope this helps you out with your dilemma. I wish that we could all get a quick fix for our problems, but it seems that it's not going to happen....LOL...it's the way I always look at a computer, they're sort of like people, they seem to have individual attitudes, and sometimes you have to show the machine who's boss.....

Warp Hunter

[sim]

the system is as follows:
Asus A7V-E
Duron 850mhz
Diamond Stealth 3 S540 32mb
Samsung 10.2 gb HDD
Acer 52x cd-rom

My friend is the one who formatted it and installed the video drivers first because thats the only cd he could find. LOL

[sim]

oh ya 256mb ram

[Warp Hunter]

Maybe you should tell your friend to reformat again......LMAO

[Vette]

I've got that same video card in my computer. Uninstall the driver you have installed now and remove the video driver from system properties and reboot. After it reboots and finds the video card it will reinstall the driver. Change the driver to either a plain vanilla S3 driver or a standard pci driver and reboot again. Then after that install the correct driver. If you need the driver let me know and I can get it to you...... :)

[sim]

ya, I could use a vanilla driver, if you can tell me where to get it.

[Vette]

Go into video properties, under the settings tab click on the advanced button, click on the adapter tab, click on the change button, click on next, click on display on a list of drivers, click on next, click on show all hardware, scroll the left box down to S3 click once to highlight it and in the right box click on S3, click on next and follow the onscreen instructions from there. That is your plain vanilla S3 driver. Once you've rebooted try running the software for the video card. For some reason it seems that certian video card software can only overwrite generic drivers. ..... :)