Installation Nightmare.

B

Bottlerocket

New member
Okay, I give up.

Lemme tell you something: I have never had this much trouble with a computer component in all my life. I thought the Belkin NICs I had in 1999/2000 were tough to install but this Radeon HD 5450 turned out to be much, much worse.

It has XP drivers. In fact, I believe that all Radeons have XP drivers, although tricky to find on the AMD site.

For a series of bizarre and tedious reasons, even though I far prefer AMD, the last three cards which I had were all Nvidias. One, a 9600GT, was a received as a warranty replacement for a card (that my girlie bought) which failed because of The Great Eutectic Bump Disaster; the next was a refurb G210 that was an emergency purchase (when the aforementioned 9600GT died) which was defective right out the box and which was exchanged for a new, factory-fresh G210 in a sealed box that started going bad after two months. I.e. of the last four Nvidia cards in this house, three have been defective.

But I could install the Nvidias. They were not difficult to install. Even though Nvidia insists that I install all sorts of crap along with the drivers, at least they install.

Between last night and so far today, I've spent over eleven hours struggling with these Radeon drivers.

What almost always happens is that, at a specific point in the installation routine, when the installer is actually installing the display drivers proper (as opposed to the junkware) the screen will go blank. And it will stay blank. And nothing will happen. For as long as I will tolerate looking at a blank, dark screen. So I will attempt to reboot (hit reset! - 'cos the machine is completely locked up) but the computer will be unbootable. So I will reboot using "Last known good configuration". And I have done this many, many times, to no avail at all.

Twice or possibly three times the installation actually completed, kinda. It installed everything except the actually display drivers. So I had this CIM (Catalyst Installation Manager) garbage, and Hydravision, and the CCC, and a Problem Report Wizard or something. But not the actual display drivers.

So a few times, in Device Manager, the card would be listed with a yellow exclamation point.

So I tried installing the drivers via Device Manager. Sorry but the drivers will only install using the CIM.

Gee.

Those two or three "semi-completed" installations had a log file which stated that the driver installation failed because it required administrator rights. Well I'm always logged in as admin, y'know? So I attempted to run the installer using the "Run as..." command, as an administrator. Didn't work - in the first place, because Windows would not let me "Run as administrator" with an admin account having a blank password.

So I added a password to the admin account. And of course attempting to install using "Run as admin (with a proper password)" also resulted in a failure to install the display drivers.

But now the admin account has a password and I consider that to be real damage to my XP installation and I will have to experiment with ways of repairing the damage.

I tried the installer on the cd that was in the box with the card. I downloaded the two different installers on the AMD website, both 14.4 pack 2 and 14.4 pack 3. Would you like to know the difference between them? I would too. Would you like to know where or what Pack 1 is? Apparently that too is secret information.

I tried installing while being connected to the net, and while unconnected.

I tried installing the drivers in Safe Mode (and in VGA mode too if I correctly recall).

I tried every conceivable combination of software options that the installer allowed.

I used DCleaner and Display Driver Uninstaller to remove all the Nvidia remnants - and I did that before I attempted the first Radeon installation. I've also used them after failed Catalyst installs except for a few times when I decided to "experiment" by attempting to complete a failed installation. Didn't help. I've looked at Device Manager in Safe Mode to see if there were any "hidden" devices that were causing problems. There weren't.

So I finally took the Radeon out of the machine, replaced it with the G210, and installed the Nvidia drivers with no trouble whatsoever.

I'm reasonably good with computers but I have no idea what's happening, or why, or how to solve the problem.

When I walked into the shop yesterday, I was prepared to spend $200 (a very significant sum of money for me) for a Radeon card, but, luckily, it seems, the only Radeon they actually had in the store was this 5450.

As much as I don't want to, this installer nonsense might will force me to buy Nvidia. I don't like them but I need to card that I can, you know, actually use.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!
 
1. make sure antivirus is disabled, I had AVG\Avast\Avira each massing up with a driver installation at one point or another, usually without any notification that anything is wrong.

2. have you tried this card on win 7\8\8.1?

3. disable windows driver signature and try again (make sure av is still disabled).

I know your pain, I have a laptop with upgraded GPU (mxm format), only way to install drivers is to manually add the driver ID to the INF file of the installation files, disable driver signature and AV, and pray to the holy spaghetti that it will work, work like every other driver version, when it doesn't .. there is no error, everything reports to be working but only integrated gpu (hd4000) works, hate every second of it.

not all members of the "pc master race" are .. equal, some gets pissed on by lazy manufacturers dropping support for their products the day they are sold... or how can you otherwise explain this abysmal experience / a mid-2012 laptop latest drivers being from 2012? only way to get win8 to work is by manually "continue anyways" during win7's driver installations ..

best of luck
 
AV, Firewall, Anti-malware ... everything other than the OS should be turned off. Basically safe mode. At least during the initial install.

And I feel your pain. Back in Slot 1 days I tried to put in a PCI soundblaster card. No problems, right? 2 days later I went to my local computer shop. A week and a half later he called and told me he was just replacing my card with a cheap ISA soundblaster and there was no charge. (and he sent the PCI blaster in for a refund).

I never did find out if it was a bad card, chipset issue or what. And a year later the PS went and took the system out (except the ISA blaster).

So deep breaths.
 
Thank you for the replies!

Something else I tried: at one point, I took the Radeon out, put the Nvidia card back in, and tried to install the Catalyst software. It would not install without a suitable Radeon actually being in the machine. Damn.

To Samuraicow's specific points:

1) I don't use A/V or antimalware, except when I have a specific reason for doing so. The firewall however is always on but I tried installing the drivers both with and without giving the installer permission to connect to the 'net.

2) I haven't tried the card under Win7\8\8.1 because I only have one computer on which I have one XP installation.

3) I did not disable driver signatures - which speaking somewhat offhandedly would probably not be necessary, and maybe not even possible, under XP, but I am not 100% sure. At any rate, when warned that the drivers were unsigned, I allowed the installation to continue.


QEFX:

If that Soundblaster was a PCI128, then I had the same card although not with the same problems. That card was not fit for the purpose for which I bought it: multitrack mixing and recording. (I seem to recall paying about $110 for it, which is incredibly expensive considering its capabilities and what the same money will get you today.)


*************************


I didn't mention this in my original post but a few times I found that my CMOS clock had been reset to 2008. This is really hard to explain.

Here's what I'm thinking.

I'm wondering if perhaps the card won't install because the card is defective. I am beginning this to be a real possibility.

So that's my plan at the moment: return the current 5450 either in exchange for another one, or to get a refund, and then to another local store which also has them in stock.

Trying another specimen of the same card it not necessary a futile course of action and I think that it's worth trying.
 
If it's easy to try another card, at least that would rule out one more thing as a possible issue.

I doubt it would be an issue, but if the CMOS battery is going I wonder if that could indirectly affect the install. I'll leave that to more techy minds than me.

And PCI128 sounds dead on. After months of scrimping as a working student I treated myself with a new game and a soundcard (to replace the original 8 bit soundblaster I'd been moving from system to system). Two weeks later I had effectively upgraded to the 16 bit soundblaster. Then again I had those cheap white 2 speaker set-up. Ah the days of $5 speaker systems. lol
 
Is normal for the screen to go blank some time especially on WindowsXP, but if takes to long then yes something went wrong, first as you are going from Nvidia to AMD you need to remove ANY trace from the old Nvidia card, only unistalling the drivers is not enough, you need to remove all the windows registry entries for the Nvidia card, you could try using CClearner for that, restart then go into safe mode and do it again, delete also any folder in the c: directory pertaining to Nvidia, again you need to delete ANY trace of the Nvidia GPU from your PC, btw what chipset is on the motherboard? If is a Nforce chipset that could also cause troubles to AMD cards. Are you also sure that drivers support your GPU?

Never add trouble installing AMD drivers but i don't have a Nvidia card since the Geforce 4 days so that is why, mixing GPU's in the same PC is never a good thing, in last resort a format of the OS would solve everything but i comprehend if that is not a option, if you can't solve it, i can only recommend that you remain on Nvidia.
 
If I'm reading the OP's information correctly, his PC is using Windows XP. And, it seems he assumes that all AMD GPUs use XP drivers. If that is the correct interpretation of his post, then, he, of course is mistaken.

AMD doesn't even provide XP drivers any longer for any of their newer GPUs. And, as such, the 5450 is rather outdated.

AMD only provides drivers for Windows 7 and newer now.

You can check for driver downloads at this link:

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download

And, it clearly shows which OSes are supported.

BUT, if you want XP drivers, you have to go to the OTHER option....

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/windows-legacy
 
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