I was recommended buying Drivercleaner to remove old ATI drivers before reinstalling new ones. And so I did. Now I find it completely impossible to reinstall my ATI display driver. When I try it keeps asking for files I do not have from an installation disk where they are not on: atiapfxx.exe and ati2mtag.sys I have tried several things. Uninstalling everything ATI related and reinstalling from the CD that came with the graphics card. And that fails too, claiming it could not find some INF thingy. I have tried a system restore, which hasn't fixed it either. I still can't install the ATI Display Driver or the Catalyst Software Suite. Obviously I am not a happy camper, or particularly impressed with Drivercleaner, considering I just paid 10 bucks to destroy my computer's graphic drivers. Save installing XP from scratch, I do not know what to do. And I do NOT want to reinstall XP. It will take days to get all my programs up and running again. So do anyone here have an idea what to do, before I put out a contract on whoever wrote Drivercleaner? :hmm: Thanks, MoogMonster.
Sorry to hear you are having some issues. The first thing you can do is give us a little information about your system. Is it a desktop or a laptop? What is the graphics card model? And are you using XP 32 bit or 64 bit?
Based on that, the first question is have you downloaded and tried this driver: ATI Radeon? Video Card Drivers
It's possible I didn't make myself clear enough in the first post. When I try to install this driver, it asks for files that I don't have and which were deleted by Drivercleaner. The files in question are atiapfxx.exe and ati2mtag.sys Even the standard driver that came with the Installation Driver CD for the hardware won't install, because some INF file is missing as well.
Those files are installed by the above driver, regardless of any previous deletion. (The point of DriverCleaner is to remove these files so you get a clean install). If you download the above file then run the installer it should install those files in C>Windows>System32 and C>Windows>System32>Drivers. The driver CD should do that too but you are always best to use the latest version which in this case is 11.2 in the above link, released just last week.
I've just gone through the process to confirm the above and DC did delete the files as planned. Catalyst 11.2's installer then created new versions.
The point here is that I CAN'T install 11.2! I have now tried about 10 times, and each time the installer stops and asks me to browse for these two files: atiapfxx.exe and ati2mtag.sys. I have uninstalled all ATI software through my ADD OR REMOVE PROGRAMS. Then I have run Drivercleaner for ATI and CCC and ATI Install Manager. Then I have rebooted. I have even tried reinstalling the hardware from scratch. And I am still unable to install the ATI Display Driver 11.2, because the installer keeps asking me to find these two files whenever I try. Someone else had the same problem. Atleast with the ati2mtag.sys file after running Drivercleaner (read Petri1's comment to this post): http://www.hardwareheaven.com/windows-xp-radeon-display-drivers/55451-ati2mtag-sys.html
I'm having someone look into this for you. In the mean time, did you select the option to have DC keep a backup of the files it was cleaning (step 6 of the instructions)?
Regrettably not. I thought I did, but I checked and there are no backup files. I seem faced with a complete reinstall of the entire OS over this.
I had a search on the internet and found also other people reporting this problem and a lot of them didn't use Driver Cleaner so this is not caused by DC if other people have it that didn't use DC. What you can try is booting into safe mode and see if you can install the driver from there. If you search for like Driver.cab or SP1,SP2.cab then you can open those files with like 7-zip and i believe 1 of those cab files should have that ati2mtag.sys file in it. Also like in your first post, saying to put out a contract on someone can be seen as a personal attack and that is not a joke. So if you are looking for help it is better to leave those comments out.
Or maybe try a 10.x series package. Some XP systems seem to be having problems installing any of the version 11.x drivers.
The required files should be in the "C:\ATI\support\driver version\" folder, but they are cabinet compressed (they show up with the extensions of .ex_ and .sy_). * Correction * Using the command tool expand.exe the OP should able to decompress those 2 files, and use those when asked for them, right? For example, copy whatever files you need to a folder off of C:\, say c:\ATI\ (which already exists), open a command prompt (start, programs, accessories, command prompt), and type in CD\ATI expand atiapfxx.ex_ atiapfxx.exe and that should expand the file. Then just do the same with the other file, and try installing again. When it gets to the point of asking for those files, just point it to that folder.
I checked that, now would that allow me to revert back and get the inf file I'm missing back? Thanks, David DD