VGA Drivers / WinNT crash with OpenGL
Subhashish Dash
I have been having some problems with WinNT related to possibly the
screen drivers/OpenGL and probably other devices/drivers too that have
not gone even after much effort. I have tried to provide as much detail
below regarding the problems. Will be glad if someone can help me.
Thanks in advance,
Subhashish.
System config
-------------
* ASUS SP97-V Motherboard
(http://www.asus.com/products/Specs/MB/sp97-v-Spec.asp)
* AMD K6 266MhZ
* 32MB RAM
* Onboard SiS5598 integrated VGA Chipset (supports 1MB to 4MB shared
video memory)
* Award® PCI BIOS with DMI, Green, Plug and Play Features
* Symbios PCI SCSI BIOS
* 1M-bit Flash EPROM
* 5.7 GB MaxtorUDMA HDD
* 32X USDrives ATAPI CD-ROM
* Floppy drive
* Diamond SoundCard (without wave table) with PnP chips
* NewCom 33.6K modem
Driver Config
-------------
* VGA.SYS? and VGA.DLL (the standard windows NT drivers) provide
support only upto 800x600
* Installed SiS drivers for getting 1024x768
* Installed Diamond Sound Card drivers
* Previously used newcom's drivers but now WinNT autodetects it
* ThunderByte Virus Checker - runs in the background too
Error Chronology
----------------
* Started with ZIP Problems (KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED,
IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL,...)
Possibly occured because SoundCard was using IRQ7. So changed its IRQ
to 2 (it provided options for 2,5,7,10. Although noticed in the
Resources that it was actually using 9). Heard now from someone that 2
may not be a good idea because it is a shared interrupt so will change
it to 10(?, System has two parallel ports so second one will probably
use 5).
Used to work fine for some time but later started crashing. After
reinstalling it used to work on and off. Sometimes the system used to
crash with the 'blue screen' and error messages, but then after
rebooting the second time it used to work fine. It would work fine for
several times and then the same crash process would repeat.
Most of the ZIP problems would have SCSIPORT.SYS or PPA3NT....
mentioned in the blue screen.
* ATAPI Error ID 9 (probably due to slow start, or sometimes??? if
audio CD is inside) - uses normal system drivers.
This is weird because the CDROM works soon after that. Perhaps it
occurs because the CD Drive is 32X and it takes some time to
'accelerate'. This is likely because the Eventviewer message says that
it timed out and did not get a response from the
device\SCSI\Scsiport1???
* After changes the ZIP problems did not seem to occur. And as the CD
wasnt really much of a problem things seemed to be fine until...
* Screensaver Changed to Flying Text (OpenGL)
It worked fine for some time but after a while Borland C++ builder
started behaving weird. Problmes that used to occur are:
** 'Invalid Floating Point Operation'. This message used to
keep ocuring several times until finally the program would crash.
** Later during the start itself it used to crash with message
like 'External Exception', 'Access Violation at ... in module ...'
I thought it was a problem with Borland C++ Builder and got it
uninstalled and even then the problems continued. After some tracking I
notice that evrytime I try installing any screen saver that uses OpenGL
the system will give error messages or would crash.
I uninstalled the Sis 5598 drivers and installed the original WinNt
drivers and then despite that the problems continued
I reinstalled WinNT yet the problems remained ... even after removing
the OpenGL screen savers.
Along with this problem I noticed other programs too (Netscape, IE 3.0)
would crash with the same message.
Lines to Speculate on
---------------------
BIOS uses PnP. Perhaps this should be turned off and PnPISA not be
installed?
Why did the system work fine all this while and then suddenly start
crashing after setting up the OpenGL screen savers.
Looks like the were several problems on the system, could it be a
combination of several of them.
Final Solution
--------------
I am reformatting my hard drive and (again!!!) reinstalling WinNT and
all the progs. Will be glad if anyone can advise me on resolving the
probelm.