I have been suffering with vertical blue lines and interference on the Windows XP startup screen (thin lines running through the "XP"). So I've reformatted and reistalled XP.
Now when I boot up, Windows looks for a VGA adaptor driver. If I cancel and leave it I can run windows okay (still with blue lines and obviously at only certain resolutions and size).

As soon as I install the drivers for my Geforce4 Ti4200 (and I tried 3 different incarnations of the driver) I get a blue stop screen! It normally cites nv4_mini.sys as the problem file.

Does this sound like a knackered graphics card or possibly a m/board PCI prob?

Any advice would really be appreciated. I don't wanna splash out on a new card only to have the same problem.

the blue lines would indicate a fualty graphics card. Artifacts on the screen.

Welcome to Pc Helpforums sorry to be under these conditions.

Does your Bios know to go to the PCI for graphic's or onboard video?

Hey thanks for the welcome.

Well, I seem to have had a domino effect of problems since I addressed the graphics card.

I replaced the card with a new 6600 and yes the blue lines were gone. However, both my CDrom and DVD drives refused to work.

Fiddled about and got the CDrom drive to work. Then the sound card (Audigy plat ex PCI) started playing up.

Reformatted and (after a few failed attempts) reinstalled XP, and Windows just kept telling me that the sound card was incorrectly installed. Changed PCI slot, no difference. All PCIs reporting OK. In fact everything reported as okay. I did notice that 2 CDroms were being identified during Windows bootup which lead me to think that that had something to do with my DVD drive not working. However it was present in Device Managers Properties. Perhaps the drive is faulty and it is currently secondary master to the CDrom slave?

Anyway, I backed up and reformatted and ever since have been trying to reinstall XP. I've disabled power management and serial ports in the BIOS but no luck. Every time I get all the way through to 1 or 2 minutes left on the installation (finalising) and the system hangs! AAAaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

Any ideas please help. I've nothing now, just a lifetime of watching Windows fail to install from the CD.... :-(

Thanks

By the way my system is:

MSI KT7 Turbo m/board
Athlon XP2100 proc
Nvidia Geforce 6 6600 vid card
Audigy Ex platinum sound card
512 MB DDR

My graphics card is AGP (in case that helps) and I've told BIOS

Why did you disable power management and serial ports?
Anyway, check all your connections inside your case, IDE cables, power cables etc.
Make sure your jumpers are set right, like harddisk primary master, etc.

Disabling power management wont do any harm, or make XP not install for that matter. You can re-enable serial port's though. I would suggest, takeing your cd/rom and dvd/rom out and taking the jumpers complrtly off. (this turns them inot cable select) Hook em back up, dvd rom to the primary IDE cable and cd/rom to the secondary. Download http://dban.sourceforge.net/ and put it on a floppy or cd and run it. This is just in case you have a bad boot sector on your hard drive.

Befor doing all of this take out your CMOS battery for 30 seconods and put it back in.. This will reset your BIOS