New Video Card causes No Operating System Found Error

User: inactive Posts:

I have a dual Xeon mobo. SuperMicro X5DA80. I have had an old Matrox G-450 card and even though I don't game, the old card is showing some age. The new Google earth has to run in compatibility mode because this card won't work properly with it. I was in Circuit City today and picked up a e-GeForce 6200. Not much selection anymore for AGP.

I came home and happily installed it. When I plugged in the power and rebooted, it recognized all my drives in the bootup, but then showed me the dreaded message "No Operating System Found".

No worries, right? I have seen this before and it usually means that I have unplugged the power or cable to the boot drive. Power down and check all cables. No joy.

Can't be a fried mobo or anything, I hope not.

I fire system back up and run the SCSI utility (my boot drive is an Ultra-320) and it verify's all A-OK.

Reboot---No Joy! No Operating system found.

I pulled the new card and put the old Matrox card back in and the computer booted up just fine into XP.

Now, I was thinking that maybe the new video card is too advanced for the old mobo. Some boards this old were only AGP 4x. I dig out the manual and there it says in the manual -- AGP 8X. New card is AGP 8x.

Do you think I have a bad card, or maybe it just won't work in this computer.

Thanks,

Kirk

usasma · Joined: May 06, 2003 Posts: 5007

I'd exchange the card - it's the only difference and you've verified that the old one still works OK.

FWIW - you can go up to the nVidia GEForce 7800 GS in AGP - then it stops.

goretsky

Hello,

As USASMA suggested, you might have a bad card. Another possibility might be the AGP bus on the motherboard does not supply the proper voltage for the video card.

Does the particular model of GeForce 600 AGP video card you selected have have a 4-pin Molex connector on it for power? If so, was this plugged in? If not, the video card might not have been receiving enough power to operate other than in text mode.

Regards

Aryeh Goretsky

User: inactive Posts:

The card does not have a power connector on it. Maybe I should get a card that has a power connector so that I can rule out the AGP power.

I didn't realize that there was a text only mode for a video card?

Someone else told me that they thought it might possibly be the PSU. I don't remember the model of PSU, but it is a big one. This computer is a full tower with a dual Xeon Mobo and has 5 Hard drives, two of them Ultra320.

All the drives are recognized in the Bios and the boot drive can be verified in the SCSI utility, so I know it is spinning up.

I have also unplugged all the drives except for the boot drive and still get the error. If it were a PSU problem, that should have freed up enough power to allow the OS to load.

I am definately going to take this card back to Circuit City. I think I will order one from Newegg instead. I read a thread over on Toms Hardware forum about the best AGP video cards for under $130 and I think I am going to order a SAPPHIRE 100131L Radeon X800GTO 256MB GDDR.

Thanks,

Kirk

goretsky

Hello,

Typically, when a PC boots up, the BIOS initializes the video card to display a text screen which is 80 characters wide by 25 characters long. When running in this mode, a video card is just displaying 2,000 characters of text on the screen, without having to use hardware-assisted geometry, Z-buffers, 3-D acceleration or other processor- and electricity-consuming tasks. When switching into more demanding video modes, a video chip performs more operations within a given time unit, causing it to consume more electricity and generate more waste heat.

Regards

Aryeh Goretsky