nVidia driver hang

Very strange one... I've never had issues with nVidia drivers...

Have a Hercules 3D Prophet II (GeForce2 MX200) card in a system with Win2K Pro (SP4). When I load the nVidia driver package, it completes successfully. When the system restarts, it hangs at the exact same point every time: when the progress bar on the Win 2K title screen fills, right before I should see the desktop start to load.

I can boot into safe mode without hanging. When I uninstall the drivers, which defaults back to the generic Windows drivers, it also boots fine.

System specs as follows...

Tyan S1590 Trinity 100 AT motherboard (VIA MVP3 chipset)
AMD K6-2 550 CPU
3 x 128MB SDRAM
Hercules 3D Prophet II (AGP slot)
Promise Ultra66 IDE controller
Mitsumi CD-ROM
20GB Maxtor HDD (hooked to Promise card)
Netgear FA312 NIC
Floppy Drive
Enlight 300W AT power supply

This system previously had Win98 SE and did not have this problem. The card resided in my own Win 2K system (K7S5A board) less than a year ago, and I did not have a problem with it there, either.

I've tried the following...

- Updated DirectX to the latest version (9.0c)
- Tried three different versions of the nVidia drivers (the latest from the site, 66.93, and a really old build from the CD that came with the card).
- Reloaded the VIA 4-in-1 drivers (updated to v4.43, but also tried v4.36)
- Disabled the AGP Master Read/Write options in the motherboard BIOS
- Reset the configuration data through the motherboard BIOS
- Downloaded and install all the latest Windows patches, including the service pack 4 security roll-up
- Reseated the graphics card

I can't find anything in the event logs that provides any clues.

I have a spare identical mobo that I was going to swap in as a last resort. The only spare graphics cards I have lying are an old AGP 4MB card with an oddball S3 chipset (3D/2X or something like that) that I don't believe is Win 2K compatible, and an old Voodoo-based Creative Blaster Banshee PCI card.

I built several systems in the past on this model mainboard running Win9x and WinNT, but this is the first time I've loaded Win 2K on one... perhaps some incompatibility between Win 2K and this old board/chipset?

Running out of ideas and would welcome any suggestions.

I'm ready to throw Win98 back on this box and forget about it...

I have an FIC VA503+, which also uses the MVP3 chipset, and could only run three video cards stably. A Matrox G400 (16MB), a Voodoo 4 (32MB) and a TNT card (16MB). The FIC website stated that that particular motherboard didn't support video cards with more than 16MB of RAM and no nVidia chips later than a TNT1 (I tried a 32MB GeForce 256 DDR card and the system locked hard when trying to accelerate Direct3D or OpenGL).

I'm not sure if these limitations apply the the VA503+ only or to the entire range of boards with the MVP3 chipset. I had a number of stability problems with that system under Win98, but it's running Xandros Linux quite nicely now.

Perhaps the trouble with Win2K is resource allocation, have you tried changing the "PNP aware OS" setting in the BIOS to 'no'? Or possibly changing the "Resources Controlled By...." setting to motherboard control as opposed to 'Auto' or OS-controlled.
I'm assuming that, since you've been using the system, you don't have anything plugged into the first PCI slot under the AGP slot. That is a known Via problem.

Hopefully this helps. :)

Thanks for the suggestions, Zerotech. I tried the BIOS setting changes, but no dice. The PCI slot below the AGP card is empty. But this got me thinking about another idea... I pulled the NIC card. Bingo, the system booted fine and the nVidia drivers were working correctly.

And thus I have a whole new problem... I moved the NIC from slot 3 to slot 4 and tried reloading the drivers, but it hung the O/S during the driver load. Rebooted and it hung again right after the desktop came up.

Pulled the card back out, booted clean and reinstalled the 4-in-1 drivers again (I've had fits with moving PCI's around that reloading the drivers fixed). Also ran hardware uninstall with "show hidden" and removed all instances of the card. Same problems when attempting to reinstall it.

Okay, so the card has a problem. Uninstalled and reloaded the drivers and tried to install a 3COM 3C905C-TXM. Experienced lock-ups with it, too.

Same brand of weirdness.. the 3COM card used to live happily in this system with Win98, as did the Netgear card.

Starting to wonder if all the hard-hangs have borked up the O/S. Had enough last night, but I might try a clean O/S install over the weekend. Also have some other brands and models of NIC's to try.

Perhaps I'll stuff and ISA card in it and see what happens. It's times like these I miss setting IRQ and memory addresses manually with jumpers on the old ISA cards. Then you KNEW there were no conflicts!

Hercules likes to add a slight twist to the drivers from nVidia. My brother had a Hercules card and I told him to download the latest from nVidia. It jacked his computer up. He eventually found the Hercules website and downloaded the drivers from there. They were older, but it fixed him up perfectly.
He's not a computer tech - I am. So my experience led me the wrong way. I was more concerned with his graphic chipset and was mistakenly believing that the manufacturer drivers for the chipset were all that mattered. Sometimes that's right, but it can't be assumed.

http://us.hercules.com/support/link_...did=10&c=0&p=0

Your problem definitely sounds driver-related.
Good luck.

Well, this got a lot stranger before I finally fixed it...

I wiped out the system and reloaded Win2K from scratch. I updated it to SP4 and ran the VIA 4-in-1 driver pack. This was all done with a 3Com 3C980B NIC installed in PCI slot 4 (the Promise card is in Slot 2). I loaded the nVidia drivers and configured the card and connection. No problems. No hangs at reboot.

Plugged in the network cable. Instant hard-hang. Shutdown, unplugged the cable, rebooted. Came up fine. Shutdown, plugged in the cable, rebooted. Hang-hang on the Win2K title screen.

Okay... I've had my share of fun with 3Com cards in the past. Unplugged the cable, booted, cleanly uninstalled the card and reinstalled in the Netgear card, came slot. Loaded drivers. Plugged in the cable. Instant hard hang. Exact same behavior as the 3Com card! Replaced the network cable with a known-good one. Same problem.

Cleanly uninstalled the card and moved it to slot 3. Hard-hang during boot-up, regardless of whether the cable was plugged in or not.

At this point, I'd done everything right, so I figured it was time to do something wrong. So I installed the Netgear card in PCI slot 1. Booted fine. Drivers loaded fine. Configured interface. Plugged in the cable. No problems!

Sitting here running updates and installing software on the system now. No a single hiccup.

Sooooo... I'm going to assume PCI slots 3 and 4 are either bad from a hardware standpoint, or this is yet another VIA chipset quirk.

Thanks to all who replied!

One final note... I don't like unexplained problems, so I went to the trouble of swapping out the motherboard with the identical spare to see if the PCI slots were bad on the first board.

Encountered the exact same problem with the replacement board, and the solution was the same.

Gotta love old VIA-chipsetted motherboards...