Soundblaster Live! 5.1 is not recognized in Windows 98

[theviceroy]

Hi. I've been looking around for days to find some sort of fix for this but I havn't had much luck. The problem is that even after installing the drivers, Windows 98 does not recognize my card, It's simply listed in "Other Devices" as a "PCI Multimedia Audio Device". Trying to access AudioHQ or Surround Mixer or any of the other Creative utilities gives me an errors message stating that "You do not have a Soundblaster card installed in this system".

I really am at my wit's end...

I figured instead of going into too much detail, i'll just link you to another forum where I had asked first... unfortunately they didn't seem all that interested.

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=67909965&m=731004436631

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[SESaskDFC]

Have you tried going into the "Properties" option of the "PCI Multimedia Audio Device" and using the "install drivers" or "update drivers" option and then pointing the install to the location the SB Live drivers are (hdd or disk) ??

Murray

 

[theviceroy]

Yep, I removed the card through the device manager, then I ran the add new hardware wizard and pointed it to the directory where the drivers were, but then it tells me that windows cannot find any drivers for this device...

I should probably mention that the card works fine under Windows XP.

 

[micker377]

In Win98, remove the board - boot into safe mode > device manager and look for audio drivers. Delete all of them. Shut down, put the board back in and reboot, the computer should finally recognize the board properly.

 

[felixc]

Since the hardware seems fine, can it have to do with the interrupt controller of your motherboard? In your BIOS settings have you enabled the "IOAPIC mode" ? It is supported by WinXP but not by Win98. I don't know if the SBLive drivers can see a difference. Can you check if your system is running short on IRQ lines? If you don't use the serial ports or the parallel port, disabling them will free resources the resources for the other cards. Have you tried the card in a different slot? It will change the PNP ID sequence,and may change things in the driver parameters. I have 3 SBLive running on Win98 machines. Never had any installation problem.

 

[Freestone]

The drivers you want are in file sblw9xup.exe. (the first one listed in your post in the other forum).

one was "Sound Blaster (Live! Series) Drivers Update (5.42 MB)" however, apparently it requires previous drivers to be installed on the system, naturally since it's an update.

These drivers do not require previous drivers to be installed. The word update in this case indicates that the drivers themselves were updated by Creative Labs, not that they update drivers.

 

[theviceroy]

I've tried pretty much everything. I moved the card to a different slot, disabled both serial ports and the parallel port, as well as disabling APIC mode (however, Windows XP doesn't like that for some reason. It refused to XP after disabling it.)

Anyways, I installed the "Sound Blaster (Live! Series) Drivers Update (5.42 MB)" but during installation, the add hardware wizard came up and attempted to find the drivers. But yet again it said that it couldn't find any drivers for the device. Upon rebooting, the add hardware wizard came up again, it appears that the driver update didn't even install.

It now lists the card under "Other Devices">"PCI Multimedia Audio Device" as before, as well as under "Creative Miscellaneous Devices" as a "Creative Multimedia Interface". The "Creative Multimedia Interface" device status states that "The MMDEVLDR.VXD device loaders(s) for this device could not load the device driver. (Code 2.)

 

[Freestone]

The drivers I posted about earlier should have worked if you truly have a SbLive 5.1 card. I wonder if at this point you've tried so many things that your registry is corrupt and won't allow the drivers to load properly.

I noticed your screen shots in the other forum showing NVIDIA nForce MCP Audio Processing Unit. I would suggest trying to disable all NVIDIA built-in audio components in BIOS.

 

[BadBigBen]

Hi there,

let me put in my two cents worth here...

Some times a driver may not work, even if the driver is the correct one due to the fact that the recognition line in the '.ini' file isn't correct or missing some stuff... happened to me with an older MSI board with onboard sound... Windows will store the ID of the Card in the HKEY_CURREN_CONFIG\System\CurrentControlSet\ENUM\PCI

there you will find the correct PCI ID, which you can use to edit the '.ini' file of your driver, by adding missing or deleting too much info, but be careful to locate the correct subsection as this can cause a little havok...


hope this helps...

Ben

If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer...