apocryph.org Notes to my future self

Getting Mobility Radeon X1800 working under Windows 7 RC1 x64

I’ve lamented before the trials and tribulations getting new Catalyst drivers for Mobility Radeon hardware caused by asshat OEM laptop vendors insisting ATI not release the latest and greatest drivers for the Mobility Radeon GPUs, as ATI does so well with desktop Radeons. As a result, you’re stuck with your OEM’s craptastic two year old driver version.

This gets worse when you’re running Windows 7 x64 and your ratshit laptop manufacturer (Alienware, I curse your name!) offers no more than 32-bit Vista drivers from March 2007.

In the past I’ve used the excellent Mobility Modder to get around this problem, but I ran into a brick wall with the latest Catalyst 9.4 drivers from ATI.  Apparently this has been an issue since Catalyst 9.2.

I tried for literally hours to get Catalyst 9.4 to work.  Usually I’d run the driver installer and it would not detect any ATI hardware, as evidenced by the lack of an ‘ATI Display Driver’ line item in the custom install options.  Sometimes I’d get that to appear and install, but upon reboot the driver would be stopped with a useless Windows ‘code 43′ error.

I finally found a solution that half-works.  I downloaded the Catalyst 9.1 64-bit driver only package for Vista and used the beta version of Mobility Modder to patch it.  Upon doing that, I was able to install no problem.  I still can’t get Catalyst Control Center to install, but I don’t really need that.

Here are the steps in detail, for when I repave this box and need to do it again:

1. Download the Catalyst 9.1 x64 Vista drivers here
2. Run the self-extractor which will dump the files in C:\ATI\Support\whatever, but cancel the installer when it comes up
3. Download and install Mobility Modder 1.1.1.0
4. Disable UAC.  I thought I could get away with not doing that since this is Windows 7, but until I did the driver package didn’t work right.
5. Download the updated MobilityDotNet.exe file here.  Open the zip archive and extract the new executable into the Mobility Modder install directory, replacing the previous executable
6. Run Mobility Modder
7. Point Mobility Modder to the folder where the ATI self-extractor put the files
8. Click ‘Modify’ to let MM fix up the MSI and INF files
9. Close MM
10. Run Setup.exe in the ATI self-extracted folder
11. Verify the ATI Mobility Radeon driver was installed
12. Reboot
13. Rejoice

This worked for me, when every trick on driverheaven to get 9.3 or 9.4 drivers working did not.  Unless you really need newer drivers, I don’t see it’s worth the hassle.

I’d also like to send out a big, wet FUCK YOU to the assclowns at the OEM laptop manufacturers who created this mess in the first place.  You assholes cost me hours of my life I’ll never get back.