VOGONS

Sudden gray screen on Windows 98 SE

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First post, by cloverskull

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Hey friends, I have one of Anthony's Voodoo 5 5500 cards. A lot of the time when booting my desktop it won't complete booting, it gets stuck in the Windows 98 welcome screen with the scrolly graphics bar at the bottom. It just stops cold. I notice right before it stops, the graphical scrolly thing will change to something that looks like the colors are off.

Anyway, if I can get the computer to boot, typically after a few seconds it'll go completely gray but I still have a mouse cursor. I can still see the mouse reacting to things underneath it (resize gadget, for example) but the entire screen is gray. CTRL-ALT-DEL does not pop up Explorer. It's just completely stuck.

Once I booted and the computer screen looked completely jacked, felt like a GPU issue. But that was a one-off.

Is this a faulty GPU causing all of this?

Reply 1 of 2, by Dipshidian

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Has it always done this ever since you installed the V5, or did it happen after using the card successfully for some time? If the former, I would worry about the card, but it could also be related to the AGP slot (assuming it’s an AGP version of V5), so try cleaning the slot out or re-seating the card before assuming the worst. If the latter is true, my first instinct would be to attempt booting Win98 in Safe Mode and nuke the drivers, then try a different set of drivers.

Without more context, this is all I can suggest.

Your friendly source of public-domain PC game video captures on period-correct hardware! Youtube: @dipshidian

Reply 2 of 2, by cloverskull

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Tbh this is a completely new build so I don't have another AGP GPU to test it with. I just ordered another V5 5500 on eBay to test against. Immediately after dropping $500 on a new GPU I lost my job! Fun times.

I am in communication with Anthony so hopefully if it's a hardware issue we'll be able to sort it out quick.

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