A little bit of knowledge...........

[Deuc]

........... is dangerous

Hoping someone can put me back on the road as my foolhardy attempt to add a new graphic card to my media PC has left me PC-less.

The Motherboard in question is the AN-M2HD which comes with the on-board HDMI - I decided that I wanted to upgrade the graphic capability so went and bought a PCIe 1Gb Graphic card (MSI Nvidia 9600GT) also with HDMI output.

I fitted the card along with the SPIDF cable and on first boot Windows found the device and loaded the drivers for it.

I turned off the machine, swapped the cable to the new card, booted and nothing but black screen.

I turned off the machine again, swapped back the cable, booted to DOS and changed the Init Display First setting to be PCIe and then powered off, swapped cable and rebooted. Up came the Motherboard Logo and then the Windows logo and then.............. nothing.

I reversed the change in the BIOS, swapped back the cable and booted happily in Windows.

I then went into the Device Manager and disabled the on-board display adapter - forced to reboot, went via Bios and changed the Init Display First setting back to PCIe and then rebooted.

It now sits at the intial MBO display and goes no further with no response to the keyboard.

Dearly love some advice from people who really know what they are doing instead of pretending they do like myself.

Ultimate aim here is to have the new Graphic card installed with the video and sound routing happily through it.

With the loss of the PC, I'm now forced to watch what the TV is showing so quick reply really appreciated.

[Blitzen]

CMOS and remove battery for 10 minutes.
Put back and all should be well

[Deuc]

I did wonder if that was the case, thank you.

I'm assuming though that this will bring the on-board Graphic back into play - will graphics be visible if the BIOS setting is set to use the On-board but Windows has the adapter disabled?

Assuming I can get back to on-board Graphic & sound using the CMOS reset what are the steps I should have taken to get the new card doing all the work and the on-board sound and video disabled?

Thanks for any help you can give.

[GoNz0]

if you disabled the on-board using device manager you may get away with booting into safe mode so it loads VGA basic drivers.

[TheWolf]

I would get it back to booting with onbaord video change the driver for it to standard VGA driver.
Now reboot, go into bios disable onboard save & exit. Now place in the new card. Boot into windows
as normally would. Oh almost forgot, before doing the reboot make sure you have the 9600GT drive you want to install on hand.
Either download or from CD that came with the card. I would go for the latest from the NIVDIA site. That should do it.

If not you may have to hit the F8 key at boot and enter into safe mode & install the driver from there.
Depending on the actual OS version you are running, some have the boot VGA option to pick from instead of safe mode or both options.

[Deuc]

All good input and thank you.

Tried the CMOS reset and battery removal - left for over an hour and then went for a start-up, system is simply hanging on the Motherboard splash screen, accepting no input from the PS2 k/brd.

Have I killed my machine?

New MBO?

[adder]

How did you clear CMOS? when you removed the battery maybe you touched something else, try removing the battery again and start over.

How old is your pc? When you are seeing splash screen try going in to bios and change settings to all minimum.

Is your keyboard ps2 or a usb one?

[Deuc]

moved plug on CCMOS1 from pins 2-3 and placed on pins 1-2 (absolute opposite to what the manual quotes but hey)

Tried the battery removal a couple of times - yes I guess it's possible I touched something else as it is quite tight in there but I tried to careful

I built the machine about 2 years ago I think

Keyboard = PS2

[BUFF]

when you cleared CMOS you have reset all BIOS parameters - if you have RAM that requires higher than standard voltage this may be the problem - try with only 1 DIMM installed.

[TheWolf]

At this point if trying with only 1 stick of ram doesn't get it booted & get into bios
I would unplug everything not needed to boot to bios.
Could be a hang while looking at the hard drive or DVD drive.

[Deuc]

Taking the remove everything advice and using the CMOS+battery option I was able to get back into the BIOS - oddly I was then unable to boot to the primary IDE (containing Windows) as it claimed the operating system was missing - booting to the Windows Disk and running a repair found the installation but didn't seem to give me any options to actually repair it so I went for a re-install of Windows with the new Graphics Card installed and ta da all was okay.

Thanks to all who gave their two cents worth, really appreciate your help.

[TheWolf]

Nice, glad its working again.
Thanks for reporting back...