Geforce 2 MX 400 driver doesn't load

[aurgathor]

Howdy,

I have an old Dell GX150 that dual boots Win98SE and Win2000.  Because the onboard video adapter can only go up to 1280x12024  in 16 or 24 bit color mode, I put in a Geforce 2 MX 400 based video card and got the latest divers, 81.98 for W9x, 93.71 for XP/2K.     The XP/2K drivers installed and work fine, and the card is capable of any resolution my monitor can support at @32bit, so the hardware itself is working fine.  The 9x driver installed fine, too; however, when I boot my PC it has some problem and the drivers aren't loaded.  At that point, I can re-install the drivers from Windows, but the same thing happens upon next boot.  When I try to detect HW, it just finds a generic video adapter. I looked at the BIOS settings, I have Auto and Onboard for the video card (it's Auto) pus 32 MB and 64 MB for AGP aperture.  I tried both 32 and 64 and it didn't make any difference. 

I appears to me that 98SE just doesn't "see" the video card.  The OS install contains a roughly year old or so unofficial SP and the USB driver pack, but probably not much else.   And since Win200 works just fine with the card, HW or BIOS setup error is exceedingly unlikely, so it's probably a 98SE issue.  Any idea on what might be wrong and how to fix it?

TIA

[dencorso]

Try downgrading the drivers to 77.72...

[aurgathor]

Thanks, that worked.  Had to install it twice (first from the exe, then from windows because the drivers failed to load again), but everything was fine after the 2nd install.

[aurgathor]

Upon additional work, it's a bit more complicated than an incompatible video driver.  I decided I want XP instead of W2K for the 2nd OS since I can still get updates for that, so I removed the HD with Win98/2K, and put in a blank HD and installed 98SE from scratch.    The first thing I installed after the OS was the video driver, and 81.98 installed at the first try without any hassle.   That means that something was on the other install, interfering with the load of the video driver.   I may do some testing to see if I can find it out.

Edited August 2, 2016 by aurgathor
typ-o

[CamTron]

That's odd. I've never had problems getting version 81.98 to work with my Geforce 2 MX 400 in Windows 98 SE. The only issue I had was that the OpenGL screensavers that come with Windows 98 would always crash.

[aurgathor]

Well, Windows 98SE has it quirks, and sometimes the interaction between various pieces of SW can get really tricky. Something wasn't right with my system since I also had no issue after a clean install.