Bricked Graphics Card Revival

[SSCorporal]

Hey neowin,

So today I have a little story for you. My Cousins fiancee brought his computer to me and asked me to fix it. Through some testing it turned out his GPU (9800gt) BIOS had been corrupted (I assume he tried flashing and screwed it up and just won't admit to it). I replaced it with an old 9500gt I had in my spare parts box. I quoted him a price, returned his PC and he asked if I wanted to keep the 9800gt, maybe fix it. So I did.

I first tried it in my system as is. Of course it didn't post, just gave a beep code and hung. So I took it out, plugged in my second monitor into my IGP, and started it up, went into the BIOS and chose to the IGP instead of PCI-e card. I started all the way to Windows just to be sure it would work properly, restarted and put the 9800gt back in without connecting the monitors to it. Even though the BIOS was set to load from IGP, and the monitor was connected to on-board. I had no video feed.

I could hear the normal start-up beep codes after the GPU codes, and all my peripherals started up, my HDD's loaded into Windows, but yet I still have no video from on-board. I also tried setting the BIOS to load into my Ubuntu partition instead to make sure it wasn't a driver error, and still nothing. Any thoughts on what's going on? Thanks in advance.

-Brennon

Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1

CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 215 29 ?C

Regor 45nm Technology

RAM: 3.00 GB Dual-Channel DDR2 @ 334MHz (5-5-5-15)

Motherboard: MSI MS-7309 (CPU 1) 41 ?C <--BIOS AMI v9.9

Graphics:

HP S2031 (1600x900@60Hz)

HF199H (1440x900@60Hz)

1023MB GeForce GT 430 (PNY) 42 ?C <-- My normal Graphics card

Hard Drives:

699GB Western Digital WDC WD75 02AAEX-00Y9A SCSI Disk Device (ATA)

466GB Western Digital WDC WD50 00AAKS-00UU3 SCSI Disk Device (ATA)

Optical Drives

No optical disk drives detected

Audio

Realtek High Definition Audio

[Teebor]

If its linux and the machine has started up can you vnc to it or ssh? you could then see what is going on.

If the machine has really booted up but the card is dead you could then try flashing it but its possibly beyond help.

How sure are you that the card has been corrupted and it has not just failed? I had an old nvidia card (last one I will ever buy from nvidia) and one day it just up and failed. It was working fine, I shut down my PC, Turned the PC on a few hours later and nothing at all.

I will only buy ati cards now as nvidia cards always do this to me and always when they are just out of warranty. However I'm sure someone will post about how ati cards do the same to them but this is personal experience.

If you do manage to revive the card then fair play but tbh I would just bin it and move on

[cacoe]

How about set up a usb linux distro and enable vnc on a working computer, then try to connect via booting from that with the "broken" computer.

[SSCorporal]

Well I would try those, but even if I use the internal graphics with the card installed I have no display. The only way I know it's booted is from the HDD gurgle and the LCD on my G15 loads the applets. And I am speculating that the BIOS failed from the beep codes, the codes it was giving were from a corrupted BIOS not so much total failure.

[thechronic]

Warranty of any description? Not sure off the top of my head how old the card is

[SSCorporal]

Nah there's no warranty left on it. Its a good 3-4 years old, atleast that's what my cousin's fiancee said. I'm kind of more interested in why I have no video even with onboard graphics, with the card plugged in. If I take the card out its fine, If I put in my 430, no video.

[thechronic]

Well the motherboard is more than likely just detecting that something is occupying the PCI-E socket and disables the onboard Graphics (as being Primary Graphics)

[witalit]

Yeah I would say its normal for this to occur when you have a seperate gfx card plugged in, even if you disable the PCI-E port in the BIOS.

[T.J]

If you are willing to take some risk you can hot plug the pci-e card after the POST. make sure the boot process stops in the boot menu and hot-plug the videocard.

This guy did it successfully:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=560851125397973585521e4f95408492&topic=56704.msg675736#msg675736

WARNING: This may cause damage to your motherboard, so if it's not really important to revive the graphics card, i would not recommend it.