On Sun, 1 Jan 2006 14:46:01 -0800, "Whipy"

To poriginal poster, correction to the subject line: You don't have a
challenge for us. You have challenged yourself; we may or may not try
to help you, but it's your crisis, not ours.

>Hi. I have the exact same problem. Did you manage to find a solution? I have
>checked my BIOS and all is correct. In Safe Mode my PC hangs at agp440.sys

Fix from Safe Mode or normal mode with VGA drivers? Of start the OS
headerless, and manage via remote access? The latter is beyond by
scope but would make sense to the network-centric.

>"Leafgreen" wrote:

>> PC environment: XP Home SP2 with latest patches. Intel P4 3.0GHz, internal
>> Maxtor 240GB ATA drive, internal NEC DVD-RW drive, Matrox Millenium G450 dual
>> head video card, 1GB RAM.

>> Everything is fine and then using Windows control panel to remove programs,
>> I removed Matrox display software and rebooted. XP went to 640x480 res. I
>> reset to 1280x1024. Restarted PC. Everything was fine. Opened the Matrox
>> software installer and cancelled installation halfway through. (oops!!)

System Restore suggests itself, at this point, if not driver rollback.

The problem is that many SVGA installers don't install only drivers;
they integrate hardware-specific featureware junk into the Display
Properties dialog, so that this can become inaccessible due to crashes
etc. and a driver rollback may leave this hardware-specific code in
effect. This can be a problem if the hardware's removed; PnP should
detect it as not there, and not load the drivers, but the featureware
may still be integrated into the system and cause problems.

>> Opened the Windows Display control panel, advanced section, and saw that the
>> only driver in the pull-down list was something like "VGA default". Also, the
>> four fields in the column on the left side said something like <unavailable>.
>> So I ***disabled*** this driver. Restart. PC boots, Windows XP startup shows
>> and then goes black. I can tell PC is still booting normally though from HD
>> activity light.

Yep, that was a bad move, on a bad OS design (i.e. the OS should be
designed to avoid this particular user failure, rather than entice it)

>> I try to boot with safe mode. PC hangs at agp440.sys. I did find the
>> Microsoft article here
>> http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;324764
>> Once in the Recovery Console at the C:>, I typed in listsvc and the next
>> line would be C:> and nothing else. I do not have a password for
>> Administrator.

Agp440.sys loads after mup.sys, and either can be the last visible (in
Safe) load before a long silent bit when the OS does whatever comes
next. Anything that dies in this silent phase, can appear to be a
consequence of agp440.sys or mup.sys

>> At this point I bring the PC with the original, genuine Windows XP CD with a
>> date of 2002 to the computer shop and leave it. Two hours later I call and
>> the tech says that Windows restore is failing because my CD is different from
>> the original windows installed on it. I think this is correct.

Interesting - did they give details, such as retail vs. OEM etc.?
What SP level is the original CD? If XP original (pre-SP1), is the
present HD > 137G? If so, SP1 or (better)SP2 must be slipstreamed
into the installation CD before it can install.

This is an issue MS simply left as a disaster waiting to happen, when
SP1 and SP2 were released. These SPs should regenerate integrated
installation CDRs, both as a skipable step during install of the SP
and via a subsequent on-demand UI, but they don't.

>> At that point I had a flash of inspiration. Let the PC boot all the way,
>> normally. Then use keyboard commands to access the Windows Display control
>> panel and re-enable the video driver. I couldn't call before he closed, so I
>> don't know if that will work. But if it doesn't, what can I do??? My last
>> backup is from a week ago, and I really hope you can help me figure something
>> out so I don't lose a week of work, which is, well, about 40 hours of stuff!

I'd try SR (System Restore) rollback before anything else, with the
possible exception of Safe Mode and undoing the Disable. In the 21st
century, an SVGA driver/sware installation would be expected to set a
restore point before it installed; hopefully by now, vendors such as
Matrox will be developing true XP sware, rather than the usual
unsigned warmed-over-Win2000 stuff.



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