driver problems - fresh install

well, remeber i was going to get my HDD formatted? Well, im not so sure the person i gave it to actually formatted it. how can you be totally sure that your HDD was recently reformatted? Anyways, he had the bright idea toupdate my drivers or somethings. nVida is stupid and doesnt know how to test things. anyways, with the "new" drivers, i launch Half-life, and al i get is a black screen, and nothing else. Never happened with the old drivers... anyways, i try to roll them back and now freakin device manger stops responding when i try to open up the properties sheet for my "display adapeter" BTW, my video card is an extremely crappy geforce 4 MX

 

By checking the volume serial number of the drive, when you format a drive it is assigned a Volume Serial Number. When it is formatted again, the odds of the new Volume Serial Number being the same is almost impossible.
Of course you would have to check this before you had someone format it for you. To do this, go to Start\Run type in "cmd" and press Enter, and a command prompt window opens, then enter the command "vol" and press Enter. You'll see something like this appear.

Volume in Drive C is SYSTEM
Volume Serial Number is 304F:1A0D

 

it has no label it says. serial is 6893-56EF
the reason i think he didnt reformat it is because ALL my settings are the SAME, even the search options, and the video settings in my games, and all my programs are there. in program files, everything is there. for some stupid reason, he took out macafee siteadvisor which makes no sense.. ill call him later today

 

Perhaps the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard was used? More on these three links.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/crawford_november12.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/getstarted/bott_fstw.mspx
http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsXP/howto-01.html