Wont reboot with new drivers
Ive got a geforce 2 in here and when I install these drivers from the Nvidia website, http://www.nvidia.com/object/win9x_45.23 , on the "Windows" screen on boot up, it just hangs. The color bar at the bottom does not change color. Im running win 98. Any advice is appreciated.
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Then, try installing an older set of drivers, like the 30.82's from www.guru3d.com.
It's up to you if you want to install the newest drivers, but make sure you have DX9 installed before you install the 45.23's (I believe they require DX9 to run, but not 100% sure on that).
Im quite sure that the detonater drivers are compatible with all geforce/riva tnt cards regardless whether newer or not and should not cause any problems
im running 44.03's myself on a p3 machine with a riva tnt2 running win2k pro (dx 8.1)
Yep. NVidia's Detonator's are 100% backwards compatable with all products from the current top-of-the-line FX 5950 Ultra to the TNT2.
However, I have run into occasions where newer drivers, although designed to support older hardware, do cause problems & lockups. Reverting back to a slightly older driver set fixed those problems. Again, not sure why this happens, but it does occasionally
Try installing them in safe mode.
Yeah, like Simdude said, of course they are supposed to work, but sometimes they can cause problems. Those older cards are officially supported, that's a given, but in my experience generational driver matching is the best way to go where Nvidia is concerned, at least when dealing with operations on older operating systems.
Get your hands on a registry cleaner of some kind (you can find regcleaner in the download section), and use it to purge your system of those driver references. Most of the time, un-installing them isn't enough. You also want to have a hunt around on your hard drive and in your Windows system folder, for relating driver files. They are quite easy to find if you sort the files by there company name. Deleting these files will insure a clean slate when installing new drivers. However, only delete files you are sure are nvidia graphics driver files. If in doubt, don't delete.
I would like to offer you more specific help but my Windows 98, is a bit rusty.;)
Interrupt 98's boot immediately after your BIOS shows its screen of wht it has, by pressing f8. Choose safe mode. right clcik desktop after letting it yell at you about reduced video and saying ok, choose settings, choose advanced, choose adapter, then use the refresh rate rolldown and clcik on adapter default, and then tell it to Start|shutdown|restart. See if it comes up.
If yes, try different video modes and keep refresh to 75 Hertz or so.
IF NO, there are a few things you can try:
first, use f8 again, but this time choose command prompt only.
at the C:\ prompt, type scanreg /opt and when prompt returns hit CTRL-ALT-DEL.
IF still nothing, look at the result of a run of scanreg /restore and see if you have a cab file that says started and has a date before you installed the nVidia pack. If so, this is how to roll back registry automagicly, 98 has a secret-- it keeps the last five versions of the complete registry file set on the HD as system hidden read-only cab files, and only scanreg can unlock and deploy them, unless scanregw /auto calls scanreg to do this at boot. one thing you never want to msconfig out of your startup is the scanregw /auto line, BTW.
after the autoreboot, see if you can again get into command mode if you cannot normally boot, this time use this command string:
scanreg /fix
scanreg has a registry fixer tool mode, called with scanreg /fix, which can resolve some registry internal conflicts, and after fixing I always scanreg /opt to clean registry of empty valued keys. Note, scanreg /fix will work to resolve\rebuild\make a whole new registry from its source files, system.dat and user.dat, and try to reconcile them with system.ini, win.ini, and autoexec.bat and config.sys. You can do a scanreg /restore, go right back into command prompt on reboot, and rebuild the silly thing to try to fix it for every .cab backup of the registry the system has at hand for you, and typically those backups run 2-4 days back. doing it in DOS prompt does NOT yield the need to get a solid reboot to GUI to make changes, though Windows might try to change some things when you first get back successfully to GUI (let it try).
Try the builtins first, I would hate to teach the uses of ext (ract) over a forum as that needs extreme precision and hands-on interaction and a lot of 98 experience. But, driectx can be manually restored with ext and you can roll back to any old drivers that have not been uninstalled by rolling registry by using scanreg /restore. If you get back into normal mode Windows, nvidia pack 40.50 should also work, and probably pack 43.63 also. 45.23 is tuned more for more advanced video cards, GF4 and some Ti3's that were WELL made and have max RAM for the Ti3's (GF3 Ti 500 is best bet for a Ti3 for those who like longer ways of saying this). I have also laid DX9.0b from a redist (for IT admins) over a fubarred directx, but you need to have the GUI part of windows up to do this.
98\98 SE reg fixing from DOS mode with semi-undoced Microsoft builtins, version 101 as cliff's notes.
John.