Dave-H Posted March 28, 2020 Author Share Posted March 28, 2020 (edited) OK, I tried again this morning, with the same result, and then thought I would try another version of ati2dvag.dll, as that is the file apparently causing the problem. I found another version to download and substituted it. The original version is 6.14.10.7280, the substitute I found is 6.14.10.7279. Then it started OK, but with very bad resolution and colour depth, which could not be fixed. I then reverted to the original version, and to my great surprise it still started OK, and I could change the settings. I actually got it into 1024x768 with 32 bit colour! (My panel is actually 1366x768, but who cares!) Great, I thought, until I rebooted, at which point I just got the BSOD again. I've also noticed that the Advanced driver settings crash when I try to use them "Error Detected! Aborting. Please verify if EMGD is active." Still, I am heartened by this as I have seen that the driver can work! All I've got to do now is find out why it won't keep working! Edited March 28, 2020 by Dave-H Typo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave-H Posted March 28, 2020 Author Share Posted March 28, 2020 Another update. I think I can now definitely say that the driver can work, if only at a basic level. If I boot into Safe Mode and disable the display adapter, when I then boot into normal mode and re-enable it, the driver loads and I can set higher resolutions (including 1366x786) without any problem. The display is good, although there is no acceleration. The display control panel still crashes if I try and use any of the tabs added by the AMD driver. However, that's usable as far as I'm concerned, at least it isn't stuck in VGA mode! It still won't survive a reboot though, it just blue screens again, and I have to then go into Safe Mode again and repeat the whole procedure. So, why will the driver apparently load OK when the machine is already up and running, but won't load when booting? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaclaz Posted March 28, 2020 Share Posted March 28, 2020 Maybe there is a way to only load/install the basic driver without the AMD "utilities" and the *whatever* that adds tabs to the display control panel. jaclaz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave-H Posted March 28, 2020 Author Share Posted March 28, 2020 Yes, I wonder if some pruning of the INF file might do the trick. I'm not interested in any of the "bells and whistles". As long as the driver will go into the mode I need, and is stable, that's all I'm hoping for. I've attached the INF file here in case anyone with more experience of customising these types of drivers has any suggestions. Thanks for any input. oem39.inf Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaclaz Posted March 29, 2020 Share Posted March 29, 2020 What I would try first (it should cost nothing or next to nothing) would be: 1) Uninstall the driver 2) modify the .inf REMming all Registry HKLM entries (i.e. open the source .inf and replace "<CR+LF>HKLM" with "<CR+LF>;HKLM" or, if you prefer, place a semicolon in front of any line that starts with HKLM) 3) Reinstall the driver This should remove all Winlogon, Autostart, etc. entries for the non-strictly-the-driver files. Will it work? No idea , but if it does it is quick (and dirty ). jaclaz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave-H Posted March 29, 2020 Author Share Posted March 29, 2020 Thanks @jaclaz. I have no normal uninstallation option for the driver, so do you think I can uninstall it using the INF file with the necessary command? The file has [Uninstall.CopyFiles] and [Uninstall.AddReg] sections, but no [DefaultUninstall] section. BTW I am horrified at the awful news coming from your country. I do hope you and yours are still OK. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaclaz Posted March 29, 2020 Share Posted March 29, 2020 Try this one: https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/display-driver-uninstaller-thread.379505/ I am not too sure that latest is XP compatible, maybe you will need to dig up an older version. jaclaz P.S.: (about Covid-19 situation in Italy) The situation is (apart a small number of areas in the North where it is still dramatic ) relatively under control, in the sense that everyone is actually staying at home (people are largely respectful of the current rules) and the number of new cases is increasing at a much slower pace than it was until a few days ago, actually the curve has flattened, see: http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/#rates Consider how now is almost three weeks from the initial (more "light") lockdown, so we are now seeing the effects of that one, the "new" (tighter) lockdown was only 5 days ago (and actually fully effective only since 2 days) so we'll need another full week at least, very likely two, to start seeing the effects of the latter. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave-H Posted March 29, 2020 Author Share Posted March 29, 2020 I downloaded version 18.0.0.4 of the utility, which is the last that works on XP, 18.0.0.5 and later versions need .NET 4.5 apparently. I'll let you know how it goes! Thinking of you all in Italy. We've only been in full lockdown here in the UK for six days. I guess it will be weeks before we know if it's working or not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave-H Posted March 29, 2020 Author Share Posted March 29, 2020 (edited) I'm afraid I didn't have any luck at all with the Display Driver Uninstaller utility. As soon as I told it to uninstall the driver it immediately crashed every time, both in normal mode and Safe Mode ("....has run into a problem and needs to close") and apparently it was a "system exception". The Windows Application event log is full of .NET 4 exception errors. I guess I could try with an even earlier version. I then tried with Driver Cleaner Pro anyway, which I already had a copy of. That seemed to be more successful, but I manually removed any residual files and registry entries anyway. Unfortunately commenting out the HKLM lines in the INF file doesn't do the trick. The crashing tabs are still there on the Display properties, and the driver still crashes when the machine is rebooted. I'll have a look trough the INF file and see what else i think can be taken out, hopefully just leaving the basic driver install. Edited March 29, 2020 by Dave-H Addition Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RainyShadow Posted March 30, 2020 Share Posted March 30, 2020 On 3/28/2020 at 3:29 PM, Dave-H said: I've also noticed that the Advanced driver settings crash when I try to use them "Error Detected! Aborting. Please verify if EMGD is active." A search for EMGD suggests it is Intel related. Get a copy of Autoruns and check if you have any remaining Intel DLLs active. I trimmed your .inf file a bit - just removed the other models so only yours should be remaining. Should make for easier modding. ATIIXPAG.INF Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaclaz Posted March 30, 2020 Share Posted March 30, 2020 Another (random ) idea. What if you replace all files (but the .sys driver) with the Dud? http://www3.telus.net/_/dud/ jaclaz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave-H Posted March 30, 2020 Author Share Posted March 30, 2020 (edited) What a great idea @jaclaz! Certainly worth a try if all else fails, but @RainyShadow has prompted me about something. I had already looked up EMGD and seen it was something to do with Intel, which I thought was strange as I thought I'd purged the system of all Intel-related files and registry entries, which were from when the system drive was in my old netbook, which was an Intel-based machine. Of course I've now realised that the crashing tabs on the Display Properties window are in fact the tabs from the old Intel graphics driver. Why they are still there I have no idea, but I certainly intend to find out! They may well be nothing to do with the AMD driver crashing, but it's one more thing to eliminate. I already have Autoruns, so I will deploy that and see what it shows. Cheers, Dave. Edited March 30, 2020 by Dave-H Typo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave-H Posted March 30, 2020 Author Share Posted March 30, 2020 OK, curiouser and curiouser! I had run Autoruns in the past on my main machine, but never on the netbook. When I ran it, it found quite a few orphaned registry entries, mainly where the files they referred to were no longer on the system. I cleaned it all up and everything was fine. I still had the extra tabs in the Display Properties advanced settings window though. I finally looked more closely at the error logs from when they crashed, and it turned out that the culprit was "emgdgui.dll", which of course turned out to be the Intel graphics user interface! Once that was gone and removed from the registry, the tabs were gone. So, I now had a machine clean of any graphics drivers. All the Intel and ATI/AMD files and registry entries had gone. Now here's the strange bit! On a whim I decided to try the resolution control on the Display Properties window, and to my amazement I found I could change it to a higher level (1366x768 with 32 bit colour) and it worked! The resolution changed, and it stuck. Even after a reboot, the resolution setting was still fine. The only thing I could find wrong was that the refresh rate seemed to be poor. So, how can that work when I have no graphics drivers loaded?! The Display Adapter still shows a yellow exclamation mark in Device Manager, and it says there are no driver files loaded and it's not using any resources. So, surely it should be stuck in VGA mode, as it was before? Any thoughts? I can probably use it like this, although the refresh rate is an issue when scrolling or moving things around on the screen, but AFAIK it shouldn't be working at all with no driver! Cheers, Dave. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave-H Posted March 30, 2020 Author Share Posted March 30, 2020 (edited) OK, it seems it's now using a driver called "VGASAVE", which I'd not heard of before. Apparently it's the Windows driver it falls back to if there is no other graphics driver installed, or the system is in Safe Mode. I must say I had always assumed that the basic VGA driver was exactly that though, a VGA only driver, so I'm still surprised that it seems to be able produce higher resolutions than basic 640x480 with 8 bit colour. Edited March 30, 2020 by Dave-H Addition Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaclaz Posted March 30, 2020 Share Posted March 30, 2020 Check: Quote Hive : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Vgasave\Device0 Key : Acceleration.Level Value : (REG_DWORD) = 5 https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/vga.htm jaclaz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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