Buddy disabled his VGA adapter...any suggestions?

He went to some snobby linux crew at a second hand comp store and they told him to disable his onboard vga video adapter so it wouldn't switch from the pci one.

so he did.

bet they were having a laugh

so anyone have a fix for this problem that every ref on the net seems to say
"you're hooped" about?

boots up, post beep, windows startup screen
then black

you can tell windows is actually up and running but it doesn't appear on either vid card.

is it possible to delete the video drivers in sys 32 from a linux bootup?

anyway
its pretty funny...

they shoulda just told him to pour water on it

isn't there an erd disk that boots windows but uses its own drivers so you can reach control panel or device manager?

Don't know how well these will work, but...

Several suggestions here:
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic68901.html

This guy got his going by using Windows Narrator:
http://www.computing.net/answers/windows-xp/disabled-vga-adaptor-blank-screen/145290.html

heheh

The second hand stores are always trying to do everything but actually make money. The owner of one in my neighborhood comes in bragging about 20 somethings coming in with computers that have tons of nudes on them all the time. "Oh dude I have a huge hard drive full of loose broads from the area".

ugh.. The other one shot some guy that stole a cable or something from his store. The courts will deal with them.

I mean suuure you might come across something interesting by accident on a computer but you never save that shit. It's not yours! Bragging to other people is just asking for a lawsuit. This will ultimately be his undoing.

I got another one 30 minutes away that's always trying to drag my name through the mud for his shortcomings. Ohhh yeah were all having a hard time from the economy he says. Even such and such 30 minutes away from us are going down, and those guys have been around for 10 years.... umm we're doing just fine Bob.. not that I'd even say Hello to you if I saw you in the street. I may fail to brake with my head in the clouds thinking about all those ripoff jobs I have had to go in and fix after the CS wised up left you. Fucking hacks.

you should entertain us with your findings.*L*

That would be awesome, lol

Onboard VGA adapters usually are disabled by a jumper on motherboard or an option in BIOS. Did he just disable it in Device Manager?

What are the computer specs? Is this Windows 7? Do a repair install. Won't loose any data.

yup. From device manager, so bios tweaks won't bring it back.

I found one explanation that basically walked through every tab-tab-tab-downarrow
running blind to find it.

I remember doing this to a machine back in the NT days
I seem to recall after 3 days it was easier to blow it away

why you can't get a basic winPE instead of the rescue console to fix things, i don't know

and why it doesn't boot to safe mode either is ludicrous design

the geek was one of those nix snobs who told my buddy to do that on purpose for a laugh.

Unfortunately for him, my friend is a bit of a psycho.
That's why I thought I'd give it a shot.

LOL

That may not be the case. I'd say it's more likely a misunderstanding between the geek and your friend. Maybe he was suggesting disabling the adapter in BIOS, which makes sense to me. This is the first time I've ever seen this: my BIOS had to be manually switched to use the PCI card over the onboard one before I could see anything on the screen. Previously it seemed that it would simply pick whichever one was attached to a monitor.

SAFE MODE .. make changes, reboot.

This is why I usually hook up DVI, VGA, and onboard to a monitor (i gots lots of inputs). My systems are finicky, so by doing this I can find out which one is the default for Windows, and make changes appropriately. Sometimes disabling onboard in the BIOS gives a blank screen, till the drivers are sorted in Windows.