old monitor out of range

I was temporarily short of a monitor yesterday so I got my spare 15" out of the loft to tide me by. It is a flat panel 1024X768 with 15 pin d-sub connection. I have multiple boot computers and the monitor worked ok on XP. When I started up in Win 8 it showed the BIOS ok but would not work with Win 8. An " out of range " sign on the screen was all I could get. Switching on and off several times only managed to corrupt Win 8 so badly that I had to boot from a recovery disk and then the Win 8 disk to recover. I tried the monitor on another pc and had the same results except that I didn't mess about with switching on and off and mess up Windows. Both pc's had been connected to full hd monitors but 1024X768 should have been possible, does anyone have the answer?

Could you boot into safe mode which will give a low resolution desktop which would enable you to lower the screen resolution to match the monitors resolution?

Boot in safe mode or VGA mode and set your resolution to 1024x768 / 60 Hz. If you can't, then try another monitor to reset resolution.

I couldn't get any display at all so safe mode was not an option. Still it is now academic as my LG IPS 224V from Argos £109.99 is up and running. This is absolutely great value for money. I did try lowering the resolution before connecting the old monitor but Win 8 would not go low enough. Windows 7, however would go down to 800X600.