ATI Fresh Install Problems

We’ve seen this reported several times in the public newsgroup, but now that it’s finally happened to me, I guess I’d better write it up. The symptoms are this:

1. ATI Graphics card
2. Fresh install.
3. Installation appears to be fine, hard drive visible, etc.
4. The final boot, when you expect to be logging in to Windows, the screen stays black.

To fix the problem, you’ll need to get newer ATI drivers loaded. Not easy, since you can’t boot into the system. But you should be able to boot into safe mode. To boot into safe mode press F8 just as the boot process switches from the BIOS messages, to Windows. From the options that are presented, choose Safe Mode. Not anything else, just plain, pure, safe mode.

The steps to fix this you’ll need another machine you can use:

1. Download the latest drivers from ATI. They’ll come in a ZIP file
2. Expand the drivers into a temporary folder.
3. Burn the contents of the temporary folder to a CD.
4. (If you have an installation CD that came with the card, you _may_ be able to use that at this point.
5. In safe mode, open the Device Manager
6. Expand the Display Adapters.
7. Highlight the primary display adapter. Right click, and select Update Driver…
8. Choose Install from a list or specific location
9. Select Include this location in the search and point to the ..\Driver\XP6A_INF folder on the CD.
10. Click OK and Next sufficient times to get the driver loaded. It will probably complain at least once, possibly more. Don’t worry, just do it.

When you’ve got the driver loaded, you should be able to reboot and get into Windows XP x64 Edition normally.

Charlie.