Gimik

In the process of switching between Catalyst 4.2 and the Omega 4.2 (I switched a few times and had the Cats installed originally), the SMARTGART tab disappeared--probably because I ran smartgart-uninstall.exe, but the shit is supposed to return after a reinstall. I'd like to have it back so I can diagnose my crashing videocard; I think it's a problem with FW (surprise), but I have no way of diagnosing without SMARTGART.

Right now I'm using the Cat 4.2s, but switching to any other version or Omega version would be fine; nothing works anyway, so what do I care?

Oh, and it's been working fine since December, so I have no idea why this is happening now.

riles9262

id say to just try installing some other version of ati's drivers, then uninstall the cp, and install the omega set of your choice...the tab should come back.

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Dyre Straits

Try doing this in Safemode.

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Gimik

OK, I tried it. When I uninstall the official ATI Control Panel and then install the Omega drivers, I'm left with no Control Panel whatsoever. This is becoming unbelievably annoying and far too fustrating. Again, I'll take any suggestions, only keep in mind that I've tried all the usual shit; the more unorthodox the better, it appears.

Edit: After fucking around with it some more, I managed to get SMARTGART back. I had to uninstall, then reinstall the drivers and Control Panel individually, but at the same time (no reboot between them). So, now I have SMARTGART. Only I still get crashes regardless of the state of FastWrite in both SMARTGART and the BIOS, and now I get some errors to the effect of DirectX (perhaps just DirectDraw) not having hardware acceleration. I'll try a reinstall of DirectX, but I really doubt that will solve anything.

Edit2: Yup, nothing.

Dyre Straits

What about your motherboard's AGP chipset drivers? You do need those installed in order for hardware acceleration to work.

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Gimik

I've tried all that, too.

After yet more tinkering, I've noticed something strange: if I install from the Catalyst, Omega, or DNA packages (with the drivers and Control Panel packaged together) of any version, it will only install the drivers if the Control Panel is currently uninstalled. If the previous Control Panel was installed from, say, Omega, and I'm installing the Catalysts, the CP will be organized like the Omega CP but with the Catalyst icons. And in attempting to revert to Cats 3.10, the CP would report 4.2. I've since successfully reverted to 3.1 (it seems), but everything still crashes regardless of the state of FW in the CP or BIOS. If the CP is to be trusted, it would appear FW is not the problem. I'd highly doubt that's the case, but there you go.

What of the crashes themselves? For the most part, games crash to desktop after about a minute, but occasionally I'll get a BSOD. That's good, right? I can tell from the dump what's at fault. Or I should be able to. But no, the BSOD is blue--all blue. No text in the slightest!

Sigh, here I go again....

The_Neon_Cowboy

dude you should allways remove your old sets before installing another set.... and then use driver cleaner

problem being if you intall ati's then say omegas you know have two seprate installs of you control panel that will conflict like mad....

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Gimik

Yeah, that seems to be the case. I did uninstall the CP, but I've been having problems with the uninstaller from Add/Remove. It acts like a 16-bit uninstall, says it can't find RUNDLL, and then tells me to reboot after a few seconds of activity. It's very strange and seems to be what's causing all this trouble. Using the CP-only install of the Cats I can remove ATI's CP easily, though; I guess I can't do the same with Omega. Oh, and I've been using DriverCleaner, but I suppose that too is missing files.

I should be able to perform a Windows Repair soon, so hopefully that clears it all up.

Gimik

Wow! How great! I format yesterday, everything seems to be working OK, and then today it just starts crashing everything again. I touched no settings at all after install, and have tried 3.10 Cats, 4.2 Cats, and 4.2 Omegas. This is fucking ridiculous, and I'm starting to think there's something wrong with the card.

The_Neon_Cowboy

did you mention what card your useing? igf it's a 9600 FW should be on if it's not it should be off

please tell us alot more about you system, drivers, bios version of your board etc...

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Gimik

It's a Sapphire 9600 Pro, AOpen AK73, SB Live! Value, AMD 1.1 Tbird, and 512MB of RAM. Right now I have the Omega 4.2 installed, with FW enabled in the CP but in the Advanced SMARTGART AGP Write is Off and will not turn on; are they at all related? And the newest drivers are installed for everything and I believe the newest BIOS is as well.

Hmm, while typing up this post VPU Recover had to restart the GPU. This is a new problem and seems sort of strange.

And thanks for the replies.

EDIT: I found some DisableAGPFW 1 keys in the registry and deleted them. Rebooted, enabled AGP Write in Advanced SMARTGART, rebooted again, and it's still Off and still crashing.

DosCervezas

Have you tried resetting your bios? Sounds to me like you have more than an OS problem. You have already done so much work (that has not solved the problem) it would not hurt to go ahead and reset the bios and then try another OS reinstall. If that does not work then I would start looking at hardware as the culprit.

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Gimik

Yeah, I've formatted multiple times and both cleared the CMOS and flashed the BIOS. I found it was sharing IRQ 5 with 5 other devices, but forcing it onto its own IRQ didn't seem to help. I'm nearly 100% certain the card is faulty, so I'm going to go ahead and contact customer service about getting it RMA'd. In the meantime I'll try some other unorthodox procedures to see if there isn't something extremely odd going on.