Ati Radeon 64MB DDR vs. ASUS A7V600 compatability issue?

I just upgraded my system from a PIII 500 MHz system to an AMD Athalon 2500+ system through a MB change. I was hoping for a quick upgrade and then amazing gaming possibilities. Unfortunatly this didn't happen. I had the new parts professionally installed in my old case with the old plug-in boards put back in. These include an ATI Radeon 64MB DDR single video out card, SoundBlaster Live audio, and a Motorola 56k modem. I reformatted the Hard drive and when I was trying to re-install Win 2k Pro SP3 the install program experienced some sort of error, crashed, and dumped the memmory. Upon a reset of the computer, the setup continued but crashed at the exact same point (right after you select your time zone and keyboard settings) but this time telling me that there was a page fault in some Kernel.exe file. This once again resulted in a memmory dump and a reset. I reformatted the drive again and this time somehow my secondary hard drive got formatted losing all of my data even though I specifically typed "format c:" not "format d:". To my extreeme annoyance at losing all of my saved data I reformatted the c: drive again and it worked this time. I tried to reinstall the same version of windows again but to no avail. I forgot to mention that I had upgraded the file system to NTFS from FAT32. I unpartioned, and repartitioned with FAT32 because before the upgrade Win 2k pro had worked perfectly with the FAT32 system. I then tried installing an older version of Win 2k Pro (SP0) that I had lying around from an older computer and this time after a program crashed during the install, windows did manage to fully install on the drive. The problem with this is Win 2k now wants me to input a username and password to get into windows even though I didn't set any users or passwords so everyone would use the same login name so it wouldn't ask for a password. I now can't get into windows. I tried to "repair" the install of windows using the cd only to find out that my c: drive now no longer had a partition on it. (Feeling sorry for me yet). I get so frustrated that I stick in my dusty Windows 98SE cd that I had to dig out of the closet somewhere and after one almost successful install I do manage to get into windows. I say almost because the computer did hang twice during the install requiring several reboots to finish the install.

After about 8 hours of struggling with this machine I now have windows on the system. Drive c still has no partition. I then set out to install the other components in the system. I takes me 2 tries to get my video card installed and 3 tries to get my sound card installed. Each time they would install but would have errors in the drivers and what not requiring a re-install. The system now runs properly, well mostly. In Carmageddon TDR 2000 with any video setting you can spend hours flipping through the menus but as soon as you get into the game it will play for exactly 6 seconds after the start of any race and the computer will freeze. I will now take this oppurtunity to say that this is not the fist time that I have tried to re-install windows or do an upgrade on a system, this is however the first time that I have had this many problems. The last time that Win 2k fried during it's install it did mention that I should once again try re-installing windows and I should check my video adapter. I have searched all over the net and can find nothing about compatability between the ATI Radeon 64MB DDR and the ASUS A7V600. The only articles are about the Radeons 9600 and 9800. I was hoping that anyone out there could tell my why this is happening and what I can do to fix it. If it is a compatability issue between the two. Can it be solved and how? and if not, what will work with the MB without causing me half my head to grey hairs. Please help me.

-Greg

 

What do you have the AGP transfer rate set to? If it's 8x, change it to 4x and see how it goes.

 

I checked and I had already set the AGP to 4X. I tried a different video card too and there was no difference. I took the computer back to retailler and they checked it out for me. I got a call the next day from them and they told me that the Mother board and the RAM were faulty. Apparently it eas the RAM that was telling me that my windows cd's were corrupt. They gave me a new Mother Board and new RAM and the thing works perfectly now. I do have a different problem now. I installed Carmageddon TDR 2000 on both of my hard drives (one using Win 2k and the other Win 98). The game will only play for 6 seconds in Win 2000 and only 19 in Win 98. There are no error messages but the game just freezes. What could the problem be? I'm buying a Radeon 9200 this saturday because I can't play Enter the Matrix without it and I want to make sure that I won't have this problem with the new card too. Thanks.

 

Is that the only you've played? If that's the case, try another and see if the freezes. If it does, you might have a CPU temp issue.

 

I had played other games but some of them worked and other's crashed for different reasons. I bought a Radeon 9200 and the game doesn't freeze anymore. The thing I don't understand is that Carmageddon 3 was sometimes a little choppy with my Radeon 64 MB DDR but ran perfectly on my old Voodoo 3 3000 before it died on me. Why would that happen?
The new card seems to have solved all of my Win 2k issues but I'm having trouble getting it installed on my Win 98 SE drive. I boot into 16 colours, I run the install program and about half way though it starts asking for the Win 98 cd for files that it can't find on the ATI cd. I ca find the files on the cd but the program can't. Sometimes the install does work and when you reboot it gives you a message saying that the video drivers could not be initialized because they do not exist or were not installed properly. It also tells me to install a standard VGA driver first. When I do that I get the same problem. How do I get around this?