Hi, I've looked everywhere, but can't seem to find a solution to my problem. It seems to be directly related to NVidia drivers.

Yesterday I was testing various Nvidia Detonator drivers for the best compatibility on my Riva TNT2, because Forceware drivers are horrible for old games. I was originally using V4.12.01.619, but updated to 4.12.01.0630. Everything seemed pretty good until I realized I was no longer able to restart in MS-DOS mode, which is quite important for me. I promptly backdated to the old drivers, but nothing changed. I was still unable to restart in MS-DOS mode. If I try to restart in MS-DOS MODE, it just hangs at an unresponsive black screen.

I then removed the display drivers completely and was able to restart in MS-DOS mode again, but obviously I'd be stuck on 16 color mode in Windows. Since then, I've tried numerous drivers from Detonator to Forceware, but nothing helps. I've also tried removing everything from autoexec.bat and dosstart.bat. I'm almost 100% certain that the installation of the 4.12.01.0630 drivers caused this issue, but I don't know how to recover from it without reinstalling Win 98 (not an option in this case).

I do have a back up image as a worst case scenario, but it's very out of date.

Any advice here would be much appreciated. Fixing the problem would be an excellent outcome, but knowing the exact cause would be 1st prize.

Thanks in advance for any useful advice. 😀

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