XP Video fault, machine runs!

Xp SP2 updated machine boots, but No video after bios loads and windows splash screen.

Here's the deal:
Two year old home built machine was stable for many months and I went away for two weeks and hard shut it down. No power.

Came home and started it and it booted, but with flaky video. During bios load, some words I expect to see during
video bios and a third party RAID adaptor bios load were mispelled.
Machine loaded XP logon screen and acepted logon, but the video was fuzzy and the desktop started loosing icons

Tried a reboot or two, and the problem got worse.

Loaded a new Nvidia driver (GEForce 5200 card, latest 9 series nvidia driver), did windows update, looked for turds
in the event logs - no difference. Did a quick windows Update, which reported that all installed OK.

Booted system into safe mode with networking, looked around the logs and no issues found, but it looked slightly flaky in safe mode.

I unloaded IIS in safe mode, which I had aded to windows last month. It said it did it OK.
Restarted and it got worse.

I panic'd and did a reset. My bad.

After that, with the flaky video on the boot, the XP splash screem was totally garbled and didn't respond to the F8 boot option during load.


Did a system restore and things went to sh*t. On boot, the bios load has $ signs scattered across the screen, but it loads the video and RAID bios
and starts XP, but no video at all after the splash screen.

I thought Hmmm. Cmos battery dead? Got a new one, and reset the bios. BUT, same symptoms.

Here's the good part. The machine is alive. I can see the shared folders from other network attached machines, I had it set to load REalVNC on boot and can connect to it from
VNC and I get a good VNC connection, with mouse response, but just a blank screen on VNC. Sadly, the folders I need are not shared.

I know it's not the monitor, it may be the video card, but there were no beep faults during video bios load.

So, the question is: I have a monitor less machine.
If I asume the AGP video card is dead and get a new one, can I expect windows to see a new card and load a generic default
driver?
How can I safely shut the machine down without a logoff screen? I need the data, which is on a mirrored raid array.
Is there a path through VNC I can use to change settings?
Can I avoid a windows re-install?
Is there a blind way to force file sharing so I can get at the data?

Many thanks in advance for comments.

 

Welcome to the board!

All those symptoms can arise from a pest attack, such as a (or more than one) virus, worm, etc.; but you have a problem if you can't get into your windows OS.

Think your inaccessable folders are likely lost, assuming NTFS, unless you purchase a commercial NTFS boot disk such as this.
Be certain it's write-protected.

After you recover what you can, erase all partitions on the drive and try a clean re-install. You may have to flash the BIOSs (mobo, video card), or replace one or both if they continue to show damage.

You can also wait to see if others have different ideas.

PS - reset does absolutely NO harm!!

 

Discussed with staff member and suggest first step should be try another (new?) video card to see if that's all that's needed. I've seen apparent hardware damage from an attack which cleared up after the disk was cleaned, but it's apparently rare.

 

It's the Card...

It was indeed the Video Card. Ugh. Less than 2 years old, and a dud.
Machine is back, but still having card driver issues. Not stable... a few BSOD's

 

What kind of card did you end up replacing it with? I updated my 5200 driver last year and kept getting BSODs, finally rolled back my driver and the problem went away.

 

Thanks for the update. Glad it seems to be the card. However, if it's flaky, keep us informed. Thought of another way to get the files in a pinch: a parallel install of windows on a slave or secondary HDD. Should work if data is not encrypted.

Keep everything backed up. I use Ghost images, but there're as many solutions to the backup problem as there are computers.

 

Mrb

Wondering if your computer has remained stable since installing the new video card?