AT My Wits End!!!

[Tomteriffic]

OK, here's the setup:

Epox 8KHa+
Athlon XP1600+
768 megs DDR
20 and 40 gig WD HDD's
Gadget Labs 824 multi I/O audio interface
3Com 905 NIC
Diamond Supra Serial port hardware modem.
Win98SE

Here's the problem:

This thing has been gradually going downhill, doing stuff like spontaneously rebooting when I try to play an audio file, , stuff like that. I'd tinkered around with stuff in the audio department to no avail. Decided to reload windows, using the /d switch which overwrites all the previous Winderz files.

BUT, I never got that far. I boot to a WIn98Se floppy and the thing hangs at the line : Scanning PCI Bus Using Mechanism#2

Goes no further. Doesn't load anything.

The thing will boot in the safe mode, but not the normal mode.

Any and all suggestions welcomed.

I'm so doggone tired of fighting with my audio machine

[John Prophet]

Boot into safe mode and run "SFC". Also see if "Drwatson" will run in safe mode.
Run "sfc" and choose the "scan for altered files" option. It will tell you if any system files are corrupted or altered, then it lets you restore them.

Dr watson has saved me several times at work when I was clueless. You just run it and it tells you if it detects any problems or unusual behavior in the system. I used it today to solve a weird sound problem.
http://www.techimo.com/forum/t26295.html

Im not sure though that it would do much in safe mode.

[MDS]

Tom is it stable without the nic,modem,sound card ? Also have you tried switching ram out? I had some ram go back and caused winders to reboot,crash or not even boot at times,I thought windows was the problem and tried reinstaling and could never complete the install and I finally figured out I had a stick of ram die.

[Tomteriffic]

I think it may have something to do with the IDE controller on this board. I booted from a floppy and did a step by step confirmation, bypassing the loading of the "ASPI#DOS.SYS" files, which basically search for SCSI drives. Got it to an A propmt and am reloading Winderz now, using the /d switch.

OK, it booted up into Windows (I had previously disabled almost everything using msconfig), now to try the VIA 4 in 1's and the specialized drivers.

I had completely forgotten about the SFC thing. Trouble was, in the Safe mode, I didn't have and CD-ROM's available and hadn't copied the CAB files to the hard drive. Thanks, so far, I'll keep ya posted :-)

Tom

[Tomteriffic]

Update:

Got winderz in there and more or less configured. For some reason, theres one of two DMA controllers that is having a problem loading drivers or something (Do I need two???).

Now the central issue is getting the Multi audio I/O card to work. Every time I install it, windows then halts on boot-up and I get an ASD (Code 11) on the device in Control Panel. The thing just won't start up! No device conflicts, nothing else on its IRQ (I disabled all the USB ports and didn't assign an IRQ for VGA in BIOS, so nothing else is on IRQ 11 except ACPI place holders.)

However, that is the subject of a different story, one better suited to them what knows these audio cards.

I'm STILL sick of fighting with this d%$n machine!

[FreakyOCR]

What kind of PSU do you have?

When you reinstall... format the drive clean then install.. you may have better luck.

[lynchmob]

Originally posted by MDS
Tom is it stable without the nic,modem,sound card ?

Did you try MDS's suggestion?
BTW,you may already know,but,Gadgetlabs is no longer in business.No support from them except what cached docs there are at Google.
lynch

[Tomteriffic]

Well, it was stable with everything a week or 10 days ago, and nothing has changed except a few programs that came and went (Nero came, Roxio went). I'm gonna try the card in another machine thats a very clean newer build, and also try installing it (even physically) fron scratch, to make sure everything gets powered on in the right order. Oh, and I'll probably put in a new 400 watt PSU that I had planned for it anyway over the weekend. Right now, everything works except the Gadget. I'm writing this on the machine in question.

Lynchmob, yeah, I know they're gone, but there's a very active newsgroup that is operated by the guy who was the head of tech support, and I have two nearby friends with similar setups with Gadgets in them. I just couldn't swing the price of another, similar device right now

[Tomteriffic]

One of the goofinesses that was appearing during last night's saga was some low memory messages and related stuff.

I ran Troubleshooter this afternoon, an industrial-strength, DOS-based hardware analysis tool, that uses the same tests as the Simmtester that's been bandied about around here. A lot ofbench techs around here use it. Everything, particularly the memory, came up clean. The board has 3 DIMM slots and I had a stick of 256 DDR in each one. One is Crucial-branded, the other are the same chips on a PowerMemory greenboard.

Now, here's the fun bit. I then took out each DIMM, and ran two of the three through each slot, running Troubleshooter.

Then, I booted up and ran the Norton memory test. No matter which stick of RAM, no matter what slot, Norton reports an error at the same address every time.

since I got the "Two DMA controllers" thing straightened out, I've not gotten any more errors, but it's running with just one stick (the Crucial) in it right now.

Who would you trust? Troubleshooter or Norton? I'm betting on Troubleshooter.

Oh, the Gadget has gotten "close" to working, even getting so far as the login screen before the machine locks up-reboot-Code 11 thing. I'm gonna pull the NIC and re-seat the Gadget and see what it does.

(Does this need to be moved to some hardware forum, now that the Winderz thing seems to be worked out?)