System hangs after installing a sound card

[ianjan]

I have installed a sound card. It was to replace an existing sound card. Windows 98 keeps on freezing after that. I have set graphics hardware acceleration to zero and I have made a partition of 1gb as virtual memory. Can it be that the older card must be deleted, because as I am sitting here, I don't think that I deleted the old card. What else can be the problem. Please help as we cannot use the computer at all with this problem. Thank you

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Yes, the old card and its drivers should have been removed before installing the new one. This should sort things out, because the new card is probably trying to use resources already claimed by the old driver.

Hope this helps CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[Win98User]

Hi,

Take the sound card out of the machine and;

Go into start/settings/control panel/system/device manager/Sound,Video and Game controllers

See if there is any reference there to your old sound card -if there is delete it, restart your machine(still without the sound card in). When it has loaded close it down.

At this point I will say that it could be a hardware conflict - but I will come back to that.

Put the card back in the machine and try to boot.

If it boots, hurray.

If it doesn't boot - turn the machine off.

Reference threads here about clearing the CMOS and clear the CMOS. DO NOT CLEAR THE CMOS WITHOUT FULLY UNDERSTANDING IT.

Put everything back together and boot.

If it boots, Yippee.

If it doesn't boot - post back with more details of your system, such as Motherboard, sound card, other PCI and AGP devices installed, What was the card you had originally etc.

Good luck,

Regards.

 

[Win98User]

Hi CitrixEngineer,
I knew somebody would post while I was composing.

 

[ianjan]

Thank you all for your advice, but once again I will need some more advice. My sound card did work for 2 days fine, then the system became unstable. Yesterday it could not work without freezing. I deleted all sound cards and reboot the machine without hassles. My modem and screencard is just working fine. My problem is that when I re-install the card self, and switch on the computer, the machine freezes at the screen "New hardware found". I can do nothing else but switch off the machine. I have tried to install the card in another PCI slot, without any success. Thus it cannot be the slot. You asked me the components of my system. Here it is:

- Pentium MMX 200MHZ processor
Samsung 52X CD Rom
HP CD Writer 9100 series
Seagate 8GB hard drive
Asus PCI-V775v2c-50 Screencard
P51430 TX Titanium IB+Bios VI motherboard
Old Screencard: ESS Audio Drive ES1869F
FCC ID:KWX-5C202-W
New Screencard: Aopen AW840L PCI
Conextant Soft 56 Datafax modem (Internal)
a Stiffy drive of course.

The problem with the old screencard was that my CD with the driver on get damaged. I was not successful to get a driver over the internet. Now the new one that is not working as it should. The fact that the PC is working fine without it, convince me that my operating system is not the culprit. Am I correct in this thingking? Please advise. Thank you

 

[mudskipper]

You might look at your autoexec.bat and config.sys files. Some ESS cards like to put entries in here that can be loading conflicting drivers or taking over memory ranges/irqs/etc that are needed for the new card.

If you are unsure about checking/editing these files, then don't just go changing things around--post here first so that we can help.

Good luck! Mudskipper
___________________________________________________________________________________

Groucho said it best- "A four year-old child could understand this! Quick! Run out and find me a four year-old child: I can't make heads nor tails out of this!"

 

[Win98User]

Hi,
I am just passing: you make it difficult trying to follow your system details by writing screencard all over the place.

Which is graphics and which is sound?

Have you tried searching

http://www.driverguide.com

User Name: drivers
Password: all

search for ES1869F

By the way, that is an ISA card - what details are there in your BIOS for ISA support?

Also, I can find no details for your motherboard so I can't tell you if it supports PCI 2.1/2.2 (which is the pci versions that are supported by the Aopen card) - Hopefully someone else will be able to.

Regards.

 

[ianjan]

Sorry, the old screencard should be Old soundcard and New Screencard should be New soundcard. Hopes this helps. I will go to autoexec.bat and see if I can get something. If uncertain I will come back. Thank's everyone. You are so helpful.

 

[ianjan]

I went to autoexec.bat, win.ini, sys.ini and no mention on my computer. To be exact nothing in autoexec.bat. Unfortunately that did not fix the problem. Perhaps a faulty card or just the motherboard not accepting the sound card? Thank you

 

[Mulga]

I am inclined to think the faulty card answer is the solution as you say at one point that it did actually work for a few days..
There were problems with PCI sound cards on some 486 and very early pentium motherboards, I have struck this problem twice but in both cases the systems just would not boot... would not even complete POST. These cards were not faulty, tried several cards in the systems with the same results, only solution was to go back to ISA cards. All things are possible except skiing through a revolving door.