In my month at my new job I have encountered the same problem 3 times and I cannot figure out what to do about it. I’m posting here hoping that someone will be familiar with the problem and it’s resolution, as nobody seems to know what to do.
This is what happens - a customer runs a recovery on their HDD, formatting and reinstalling all the software. When the system reboots after the recovery the display on the Windows Setup screens is so big that most of the screen is not visible and cannot be selected. There is a blue bar covering a large portion of the left side of the screen. Setup is impossible to complete because we cannot read the fields that need to be completed. Manipulating monitor controls does nothing.
We can boot into safe mode and get a normal display, but removing and reinstalling the display adapter drivers and the monitor drivers does not fix the problem. I’ve tried forcing default refresh rates in Display Properties as well, and about everything I can think of, and nothing works.
I have encountered this problem on Emachines, HP Pavilions, and I believe a Compaq as well. So far I have not been able to find a resolution, but one customer had a friend of her son’s work on the computer and he fixed it, but she does not know how he did it.
What is causing this problem? I’d think that Windows Setup would use the same default video settings and drivers that Safe Mode uses, but it apparently does not, or there is some other factor at play here.
Has anyone run into this same problem? If so, I would like to know how you fixed it. So far the stock answer has been to tell the customer to get a new recovery kit, but I know this is not it, it just delays the resolution and costs the customer money.
remove any references to the video card driver in the system properties device manager tab(while in safe mode) and then install standard VGA.
When you boot into normal windows you will be at 640x480 16 colors.
THEN install the correct drivers.
You can in Safe Mode, but we are trying to get the computer to have a proper display in Windows Setup, which is what the computer goes through the first time you boot it up (or the first time you boot it up after running a system recovery).
The problem appears to be that Windows Setup has it’s own display settings that are independent of regular Windows settings, and I can’t figure out how to adjust them, if that’s even what is causing the problem.
BTW, you can’t install Standard VGA in Safe Mode after removing all referenes in DM. You are not given an option in the Advanced Display Properties to change the Display Adapter if there is nothing installed, and Add New Hardware does not function in Safe Mode.
Are you absolutely sure about this? Every time you change resolution or refresh rate, the monitor’s geometry gets a little screwed up. You’re quite certain that the image on the monitor stays screwed up even though it’s been sized correctly to fit the screen?
Also, what version of Windows is this you’re attempting to reinstall? Safe Mode in Windows XP is indeed capable of using a higher resolution than that used during setup.
look in the page of your bios where your hard drives are listed and see if there might not be a video bios option. Older computers used to have options like 40 column or 80 column ega or vga. make sure it says vga
The only time this has ever happened to me is on systems where I was swapping video cards and the system insisted on trying to install a prior VGA driver and the system display font was set to large. The display stayed like this until I installed the correct driver via safe mode or reset the system font in display properties under safe mode. If you do not have the precisely correct video driver the video chipset is asking for, the change will not take and you will be back where you started.
The aforesaid situation was with a pre-existing driver set. I really don’t see how this is happening with a fresh install to a formatted disk unless your “recovery package” files are somehow corrupted or otherwise incomplete for the system in questions.
I really have no clue what you’re doing or what this “recovery” package is, but as a final note this kind of thing could possibly happen if someone is using generic MS windows install disks to re-install windows and the system is looking for a specific video driver that is not on the standard windows install disks. One thing that all the systems you mention have in common is that they usually have a special purpose video chipset on the MB that shares system memory and may need OEM drivers that are not found on the windows setup disks, and they may not conform to generic baseline VGA video Windows setup parameters like add in video cards would. OEM installs can get around this because the video driver is included in the OEM driver set, but setups like this can be problematic using standard MS install drivers. The monitor settings will probably have little or nothing to do with this problem.
One last thing to check is that the video hardware settings on these systems can usually be changed in the BIOS. The adjustable parameters are normally video memory size and refresh rate. Have the clients choose the maximum video memory size and minimum refresh rate. If the chipset is trying to force a refresh rate of 75 or 85 hz right from bootup and the generic windows startup VGA drivers are looking for 60 or 65 Hz and cannot handle that refresh rate gracefully you will potentially get the kind of mangled display you described.
Recovery kits (or ‘Restore Packages’ or ‘Quick Restores’) are CDs (usually a set of 2 or 3 for most newer computers) that come with certain name brand PCs that I do hardware support for. They are basically a compressed image of what comes on the hard disk drives of the computer when you take it out of the box, along with software for reformatting and partitioning the HDD and decompressing the disk image. They are bootable so technically a customer should be able to put one in, reset his computer, follow some simple directions, and resolve whatever software issue they might have (with the discouraging side effect of losing everything that has been added to the HD since the computer was purchased).
Unfortunately, they are usually very finicky and one has to take several precautions before running one to make sure that some kind of non-hardware problem doesn’t survive the process. Weirdly illogical things happen after hard drive restores, even when they are seemingly done right. We have to do them a lot anyway, as a kind of final proof that an issue is or is not a hardware failure, after every other troubleshooting step comes up with inconclusive answers.