Disabling onboard graphics through bios?

I had somewhat similar problems when installing a PCI GeForce 6200. If you're running XP, try what I did. Maybe it'll work or you too.

 

Let me preface by saying that the built in video chipset and the inability to actually DISABLE the chipset via BIOS is really annoying.

 

Best you can do is restart the machine, hit F2 to get into the BIOS, go the Onboard Devices or whatever and set onboard video to Auto rather than onboard. I'd rather there was a 3rd options to "disable onboard" but I guess it's auto so that if your card doesn't function it'll switch back to the built in Intel chipset so you don't get a worthless black screen and no way to fix it without knowing the exact timing and keystrokes to get back to BIOS and reenable the onboard video. Hope that made sense. Still annoying since without disabling it, the intel chipset keep reinstalling itself and messing up the Nvidia install (at least in my experience).

 

So, my solution was to drop into Safe Mode under XP, uninstall the Intel driver (it ended up reinstalling itself, but at least I felt better having at least tried to uninstall it), or go to Control Panel -> System -> Device manager, right click the intel chipset and disable, or go into properties and disable temporarily.

 

Tell the machine to search for new hardware (if it didn't already detect the nvidia card). If it did and you didn't install it, go to Control Panel -> System -> Device Manager and uninstall the nvidia card it detected. Now tell it to re-detect hardware, when windows says it found new hardware manually install the driver, tell it where to find the driver on the CD and let it install that driver (or if you don't have the CD, you'll have to download the latest drivers from nvidia's web site and try it that way from a regular boot-up not safe mode).

 

Anyway, let it install the drivers from the CD, then boot it into regualar windows (make sure the monitor is connected to the new video card, not to the onboard VGA port).

 

Once you get into windows, it may tell you it found new nvidia drivers and the ininstall them. Or it may just work... Now you can open the cd and run the actual driver install program (rather than just putting in the basic driver), and it should find the card (in my experience doing it any other way, the nvidia installer wouldn't find the card and would exit; once the basic driver was installed in safe mode via widows finding it and you pointing to the CD, the actual installer program from the CD would run properly and find the hardware and install all the nvidia controls, etc.).

 

Your mileage may vary with other OS's,but similar techniques may work. Though I don't think you can install drivers from safe mode in 98SE, and I've never used the kludgy ME operating system so who knows.

 

Ohh, and this was under XP Pro SP1, but I'd ASSUME it would work uner all XP versions/revisions?

 

So, long story short:

 

BIOS -> Onboard devices -> video set to "Auto."

In windows and/or safe mode if regular windows won't do it, uninstall and/or disable the intel video chipset. Let the computer find the Nvidia hardware but point itto the cd to get the basic driver on the system. restart, then run the actual installer and hopefully it will find the hardware and install all the nvidia controls, etc.

 

I think the main thing is disabling the intel driver, getting only the basic driver onto the system, THEN running the full installer?

 

That's how I finally got mine running anyway. Though I may have eventually not even had the intel driver disabled, and it still worked.

 

IT was a pain though, I'll tell youthat much.