Radeon 9600 - can't install driver

BombJackl

Ok folks - I think this may be a common problem and I've tried some of the potential solutions suggested elsewhere. I've only just discovered this site though, and you guys may have better ideas.

Anyway, here's my issue...

My Laptop is a Clevo 400e (or rather the mainboard is - the laptop was a 410v before the mainboard screwed up and I replaced it).
Laptop is a 3ghz P4 running XP Home or Pro (not sure), and in general appears to work well.

Problem is that the recently fitted new mainboard twasn't the exact same type of board that was originally in the machine.
What this means is that once the new install was completed, I needed to re-install drivers and such.
In the most part this was a pain free process, even though I don't have the original drivers disk (I just bought the board - disk wasn't supplied).

Problem is though, that when I try to install the graphics card drivers there's an issue.

The ATI Catalyst installer stops the installation process before it's even properly started, and says that there's no VGA driver, and I need to install this first before the Catalyst drivers can be installed. It said I could try and boot into XP in VGA mode and this might help, but I've tried this and it didn't work.

So, I've tried a few things.
I tried de-activating the VGA Driver in Device Manager (the VGA driver had a yellow exclamation mark next to it.) This didn't help.

I did a google, and downloaded what I thought were the proper VGA drivers from the Clevo website, but all these seem to be are repackaged ATI Catalyst installers.

(The other thing with the Clevo site is that the naming conventions used on the website to get the correct drivers are a bit misleading as they don't call it a 400e, even though it's most commonly known as this - either way, any of the driver packages which might be correct all have the same problem - ie can't get past the initial phase because of the lack of VGA driver.)

So, after trying all these different ATI installers, I have somehow managed to remove whatever driver was installed in the VGA category, as it say's that there is no driver installed at all ie there's a yellow question mark there now, whereas before it was an exclamation mark).

From my googling on this subject, I've found that loads of people seem to be having this installation problem. I can't remember the exact error messages, but I think it says "INF Error - VGA driver not found".

Anyway - remembering in the past something about being able to sometimes use 3rd party drivers for audio and such, I thought I might be able to do something similar for the gfx, so I did a google for Alternative Radeon drivers, and stumbled across Omega drivers. I downloaded the Radeon Omega driver package, and this installed easily.
The problem is though, that it appears as though this Driver package says that there isn't a Radeon card installed, even though after a couple of scans with Everest, and Belarc Advisor, both say the graphics card is a Radeon mobilty 9000 series (specifically I think it's a 9600 but can't be 100% sure).

I'm at a major juncture. I think if I can get some kind of generic VGA driver installed, I might be able to get the proper ATI drivers installed, or the Omega ones if I wish. I just can't get past this intial stage.

So, can any of you tech heads help me with this issue?
Am I completely barking up the wrong tree?
It's really getting on my pecks - I've spent hours trying to sort it, with not much joy.

Any help really would be very very appreciated.


PS - surely some kind of driver must be active if I can actually use the display anyway - I've booted into XP no problem, and have been surfing the net without difficulty with it, so what's the deal?