PCA Forums

Last night I was trying out my Abit NF7 out in a 1U case (which doesn't fit). So then I put everything back in my case, booted up and there were no problems. Today when I went to go play DesertCombat, there was no sound. I figured I had plugged my headphones into the wrong jack, but nope. I was to sound options in control panel and it said there was no hardware device installed. So i powered down, took the card out, made sure there was no dust clogging it, put it back in. When i booted up, all of my PCI devices started reinstalling their drivers (Windows XP) except my Soundblaster LIVE 5.1. Not sure why they did that... Anyways, i tried this again and nothing happened this time, but my other PCI devices (firewire card, tv tuner) were working. So I uninstalled the drivers and tried to reinstall them and got this:



I went to device manager and started messing around, but there was no sound card there. So i tried to add my own using the generic soundblaster driver microsoft has. It gave me this:



and furthermore:



After that i took out the card and tried enabling onboard audio in the BIOS (i had it disabled) and when it started up it hung at the boot screen... well, the bars kept going for minutes so i knew nothing was going to happen. I am pretty sure that is irrelevant because my onboard audio has always caused me problems.

So that is where i am at now... if it means anything i put in another very similar Soundblaster LIVE to make sure it wasn't the card, and that card had the same problem. I'm thinking maybe just a nice clean windows reinstall might help, but i'm curious to see what you guys come up with on this first. Thanks in advance.

Try putting the Sb Live into a different PCI slot, preferably one you know that isnt using shared resources. Also, try setting your PCI Latency timer to "0" in the BIOS, if it all possible. Are you overclocking any/ is your PCI bus running out of sync?

I've tried putting it to a different PCI slot, however, a different card had been in there. I will try one i never use. I do have my FSB overclocked to 200MHz but the AGP/PCI is locked w/ nforce 2 so that's not my problem. I'll have to look into the latency timer. The thing is it had been working fine for almost a year in the same setup... so it was something that happened last night that triggered this.

WOW! Cool. It is working. I'm not sure whether it was the different PCI slot or the PCI latency but who gives... it works! Thanks rogue!

Or not... When i first booted up windows came up with that found new hardware thing so i thought i was set. But when i went into device manager, it stopped reponding and i couldn't end the task. So i rebooted and when i booted back up it was gone from the device manager. Then i changed the PCI timer back to 32... still the same. Then i moved the card to the last PCI slot that i've never used... still the same. I'm pretty pissed right now... that i have such a POS sound card. The quality is fine for me, and i've always heard all these aweful stories about problems... just incredibly weird that it worked for so long and then just stopped working? Bah... anything else i should try?

Ok.... it started to install itself again. but then everything stopped responding. This is with the PCI latency timer set to 0. I'm not sure whether it is the PCI latency causing the problem or the card. I tried another card before, but it was in the same slot the other card had been on and it had never started installing itself. So i'm thinking the card is bad and i'm about to try the other one again.

Now it is constantly locking up in windows.... whether it is idling or not. It has locked up two times idling and once burning a CD. I'm putting a fresh install of windows on and hoping it was just a massive driver conflict or something. *Note* it was locking up WITH the soundblaster in, so i'm thining it may have been screwing things up with the drivers. I just hope it doesn't lock up now that it is out. i'll let you know what happens.

Ditch the SBLive. It has serious PCI IRQ Channel Sharing issues. I threw mine in the trash after buying an NForce2 mobo.

Your mobo probably has decent onboard audio. Use it.

It might be.... but...

http://www.pcabusers.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33032