Unable to load 9200 drivers - ATI or Omega

Sam Alcorn

This is going to be a long one as I have been fighting this for 5 days.

Shuttle MK32 MB
XP Pro w/SP2
ATI Radeon 9200 AGP

I can not successfully load either the latest ATI drivers or the Omega ATI drivers.

I bought a 9200 about 3 weeks ago and installed it with little problem. I started having intermittent BSOD faults with c000021a faults. MS Support says this is a driver problem so I updated to the latest VIA drivers. Still had the problem so I got the latest ATI drivers and attempted to install them. The install failed with the error: "Setup was unable to complete the installation. Try to setup your display adapter with a standard VGA driver before running setup".

I'm not real sure how to install a VGA driver under XP so I rebooted into VGA mode and reran the setup with the same error.

I'll leave out about 3 days of frustration and list only the actions that I started doing every time and can repeat the results consistently.

1. Uninstall all ATI or Omega software. (Note 1: Depending on which I tried last)
2. Uninstall both Radeon instances from Device Manager.
3. Reboot into VGA mode. Device Manager finds 2 VGA controllers.
4. Run RegEdit for any instances of ATI, Radeon, 9200 or Omega (Note 1)
5. Run RegScrubXP and let it clean everything.
6. Run System Mechanic and let it clean the registry.
7. Compact registry using System Mechanic options.
8. Reboot into Safe mode.
9. Redo steps 4-7 again.
10. Reboot normally, system finds 2 VGA controllers.
11. Cancel "Found New Hardware Wizard".
12. Install using appropriate program.
a. If I use the software installer (either Omega or ATI), it installs the driver 4 times, 2 I understand but I don't 4. The install fails with the same error "Setup was unable to complete the installation. Try to setup your display adapter with a standard VGA driver before running setup."
b. If I install the drivers thru Device manager the install fails with an error "Unable to find the specified file.". This error is the same if I am trying to install the Omega or the ATI drivers. The last file that I see copied is "atiiiexx.dll" and I've seen it often enough that I believe that it is the last file copied. Maybe the .inf file is specifying something else to be copied?

For further information:

The above are the core steps that I have taken for several days. I can shutdown the system after performing all steps thru step 9 and remove the Radeon and reinstall my old video card and the system runs fine. Before I found the Omega drivers and was only working with the ATI drivers I even went so far as to install my old video card, reboot into command prompt and delete ALL files on my hard drive that began with ati.

Any help would certainly be appreciated. During the time that it worked I got used to being able to play games with the faster speed and better resolution than my old 16MB video card offered.

Any questions that you want to ask feel free as I'm at a loss and don't know what else might be tried.

ChoGGi

try using drivercleaner in safemode to remove the ati drivers then move any oem*.inf oem*.pnf from C:\windows\inf elsewhere and let windows install its drivers for your video card then try installing the ati or omega drivers

edit: http://drivercleaner.net/

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