troubleshoot me! please?

[Ch1m3r4]

I built a computer for my aunt that has a shuttle mn31n-onboard everything (i'm pretty sure that's it anyway) in it. It was fully patched and clean of viruses when I brought it to her house. Running windows xp. Corsair RAM, liteon optical, maxtor hdd.

Upon the first time connecting everything and powering the system on, the monitor will show all the bios/pre-os stuff and will show the windows xp splash screen, but as soon as it gets past that, the monitor goes black and goes into whatever standby mode it has (the light goes from green to orange on the monitor). All the cables are still connected fine, etc.

Safe mode loads up fine. The option half way down the safe mode choice screen entitled "Enable VGA mode" works fine. HOWEVER, when I load up into whatever this vga mode is, if I try to change any of the graphical settings, the screen again goes black and into the standby mode. Once this happens I have to hit the reset button.

That is all with the monitor plugged into the #1 port. With the monitor plugged into the #2 port (the onboard video has dual vga) the same problems occur, except that instead of just going into standby mode, the monitor goes into standby mode, then clicks out of it (but screen stays black). It repeats this every few seconds, so you can watch the LED go from orange to green with an audible click everytime.

I have tried multiple monitors, didn't help. So my question is basically whether this is a mobo/onboard video problem or a windows problem.

any help/input is MUCH appreciated.

 

[133]

can you get into bios ?

if so check all settings.

are you trying to boot from the xp cd ? you should be if you are formatting the drive.

 

[dandragonrage]

Try changing the display adaptor to something generic in safe mode.

 

[Ch1m3r4]

can you get into bios ?

if so check all settings.

are you trying to boot from the xp cd ? you should be if you are formatting the drive.

I can get into bios, all settings are fine. I'm not trying to boot from the xp cd because windows is already installed and I don't need to format the drive...Unless this is all resulting from a bad windows install, in which case then I will boot from cd and reformat reinstall.

 

[Ch1m3r4]

Try changing the display adaptor to something generic in safe mode.

went into safemode and removed video card from system properties, restarted into normal mode.

generic vga worked fine, windows recognized the video card and reinstalled the drivers and now it seems to be working.

but how would it go from working to not working just from transporting it to my aunt's house? (other than simply blaming it on windows)

 

[Gruntled Employee]

the other thing to do is get into safe mode and remove monitor then restart....if video card is set up for another monitor it could be using the refresh rates desinged for monitor it was setup on.

 

[DevilDoc]

but how would it go from working to not working just from transporting it to my aunt's house? (other than simply blaming it on windows)

The problem may be different monitor models/drivers. I've had this problem happen when switching from an old 17" to a newer 19" monitor. Set the graphics adapter to generic VGA AND remove the monitor from the Device Manager, then reboot and let XP find/install the drivers. That should take care of the problem.

edit: That's odd, I didn't see gruntled's postage. weird.

 

[Ch1m3r4]

that's what I thought originally because her monitor is old, but I brought it back to my house and tried it on a newer 17" and it did the same thing, plus the monitor in system properties that it was using was just "default monitor" no real drivers were used.

but I'll keep that one in mind.
it appears to be working now, so ::shrug::