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General Troubleshooting
If your machine crashes when copying files from the CD-ROM drive, try disabling DMA on the CD-ROM drive.
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intel ultra ata storage driver 6.10 was the cause of my soundblaster live Plat 5.1
problems such as blue screens and stack dumps and page faults when ever doing any sound projects in 98se and in winME. once I uninstalled ata driver it has been stable I beleive the older driver is ok Im about to test it out for a day or so, It was a case were I upgraded the driver the same time I upgraded the Plat to the Plat 5.1 So I did think it was the 5.1 as I got rid of my old card and couldnt try it out
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Here are some suggestions in regards to the various lockups, in steps:
Before you do anything, make sure you have copied the win95/98
installation files on you hard disk.
(It is more effecient and safer to configure windows using this method)
1) BIOS Config
- Configure the various PCI IRQ's in numerical order in terms of
Slots i.e PCI Slot 1=IRQ 9, PCI Slot 2=IRQ 10, PCI Slot
3=IRQ11 (The major reasoning for this, is that you control the
IRQ selection and not windows)
- Configure the BIOS to specify any legacy (ISA) adapters,with
reserved IO, IRQ and DMA settings. (Make 100% sure you know
what the legacy non plug-play adapter settings are)
- Remove USB IRQ if you are not going to use any USB devices.
- Make sure that the DIMM & CPU tweaks are default
(There is no point overclocking the memory and CPU if the
system is locking up, ..yet)
2) Initial Boot
- press F8 & then shift-F5 to get into a DOS command line
session
i.e Do not boot into windows (Alternatively use sysedit in
windows)
- edit config.w40 (if there) and config.sys and rem out
everything
(This is to remove any real-mode drivers. The source of most
probs)
- Check the autoexec.w40 and autoexec.bat and remove anything
calling up a bat,com,exe file.
- NOTE: if you have older kit that have no Windows drivers(old
CDROMS, the above might affect availability)
3) Windows Boot
- Go to System within Control Panel.
- If there are any devices with problems, delete them. (Don't
Reboot)
- Check that the IRQ's are as you previously configured in
the BIOS
- Check that there are no clashes (The only IRQ's shared
should be through PCI steering). Check the DMA, I/O and mem
as well.
- Reboot
- go back to system and check all devices are present and
correctly configured
4) SBLive Specific Problems
- SBlive Various
- If the Sound Blaster Live! drivers and s/w is installed,
uninstall everything. With a clean reboot re-install but do
not select DOS drivers.
- Follow the installation directions and complete succesfully.
- Reboot.
- Go to creative multimedia devices and double click on SB16
emulation. Unless you have DOS games (nowdays?) click
on "disable in this h/w profile".
- Reboot
- SBLive crackling/noise with most directsound games
- Oddly enough in one of my systems this occured because of
DirectX6.1 and the Monster 3D. The very latest 3dfx REFERENCE
drivers sorted this problem out.
- In another system, by disabling the USB controller in control
panel/System this problem also went away. But disabling USB
will obviously affect the operation state of any USB devices.
5) Other Problems
- My system had another problem that was pretty difficult to
faultfind.
- During the Installation of any program the system would
lockup.
- Sometimes the screen would be partially scrambled. After heavy
win.ini and system.ini testing, the problem was linked to the
pnpdrvr.drv.
- This is a virtual driver linked to the display adapter/monitor.
Disabling this driver, allows the system to only operate in a
fixed 640x480x16 mode for the primary display adapter.(Not 2nd
3D card)
- The above problem turned out to be PCI bus hogging by the
primary display adapter.
- Turning down the hardware acceleration performance by two
notches, sorted this problem out for me. (This can be found in advanced adapter settings
and in the Control Panel-System-Performance)
- If nothing is working for you then you can attempt the PCI Bus
options under System Devices-PCI Bus.
- Under settings try bios for device enumeration.
- Under IRQ Steering try getting protected mode tables.
- Finally if you want a clean PCI setup, delete PCI bus and
reload to have the system rediscover and reconfigure every PCI
card.
- Nothing beats a new Windows install though. Copy the windows
installation directory to the hard disk. I would advise doing a
fresh install, and not simply re-installing over windows. Do
this by removing the windows and program files directories
through DOS. This is acheived by rebooting into
dos, selecting previous OS boot. Himem.sys should be previously
loaded in the config.dos or the DOS config.sys.
Load "smartdrv 2048" to speed up the caching before attempting
to delete any of the older directories or running windows setup
from DOS.
- The smartdrv caching will cut the installation time by more
than 3/4's.
Hope this helps.
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I just wanted to say, I too have used an SBLive in an
Athlon system with no Athlon-related troubles thusfar.
In fact, my vendor (ABS) offers SBLives as almost the
sole option for Athlon systems.
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Shutdown Problems
Having problems shutting down? One of our readers disabled the Sound Blaster 16 Emulation, and the problems went away.
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Our Sponsor:
| 4 Digital Outputs?! |
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The Sound Blaster Live! has 4 separate S/PDIF digital outputs, with each of them carrying stereo (left & right)!
These outputs are available on a I/O card with the Digital DIN output.
The latest SBLive! 5.1 series uses 3 of these outputs to carry 6 channels of information.
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