Okay I have a Santa Cruz soundcard and last night I went to the web sight and downloaded the latest drivers and installed them. Well upon rebooting my system and firing up windows media player to listen to some tunes whilst being artful my computer froze. I did a ctrl+alt+del restart and everything went to hell.

My mouse quit working, my nvidia video drivers went missing, ect. I finally got windows to cooperate and reinstalled all missing drivers, ect. and all is well now except my sound card doesn't work at all.

I have un-installed the "new" drivers and reinstalled the "old" drivers and the device is listed in the device manager as "working properly" but nothing happens. If I check the drivers properties it tells me the drivers are loaded properly but the device doesn't work for an unknown reason.

I have rooted around the turtle beach website for any helpful faq to no avail and I really can't afford to pay for tech support. The next step I will take is to physically remove and reinstall the sounscard and see what happens.

Any insight or help on why this happened and how to fix it or avoid it again would be helpful.

Thanks.

[ 05-27-2003, 05:48 PM: Message edited by: Chewbacca ]

ok, have you tried running the diagnostic on it? sometimes that will help, we have had problems with our too, after we installed the nvidia vedio card everything went to hell, do you have a roll back system? if so try rolling your hard drive back to just before you updated the drivers, see if that works, if you do not have one, then I am clueless how to help you, ours fixed it self after about 2 weeks of critcal errors, it works fine now, but still has a problem installing off of cd's, anyway hope this helps

I don't have any sort of system roll-back utility that I am aware of, but I'm going to investigate them if it will prevent this from happening again. I need sound on my PC!!!!
Thanks for the reply Stormymystic. [img]smile.gif[/img]

if the problems occoured after restarting from the internet, search for viruses. otherwise it sounds like time for a clean install of windows - does wonders for the speed and stabilty of your machine. you could get a techie freind to spend a couple days solving these problems, but to be honest it would take more time and effort than is really worth it.

hmm.. well... format --- > reinstall windows can do it.. :( (i dont like that too)

other than that.. im lost..

You can do a fresh install of Windows over the top of your current install. What it will do is put everything back to what it was. That's saved me a couple of times.

You can also try de-installing the sound card completely (remove it from device manager). When you get a prompt, tell windows to get rid of the drivers. Then reboot, and it should find the card again. Tell it what drivers you want to use at that point. Alternately, you can install the old drivers specifically; don't agree to the "use the drivers on disk" question, but specify the exact one you want to use.

Beats the heck out of a format... but not by much :D

Thanks ya'll. I love how friendly Ironworks people are! [img]smile.gif[/img]

One more question....
If I reinstall windows will I hafta reinstall ALL my applications and reload my files on my hard drive from a back up? Or will windows simply write all the essential files leaving everything else intact?

Windows will not de-install your applications. It may try to change file associations to their defaults, but it should leave 'most everything else alone.

I've done it before, and it hasn't been that painful.

please note: if you format, then install from fresh all your apps + data will go. however in my expirince if you use the reinstall feature to install over the top of your old install, you still get many of the instabilitys and quirks that you had before, and possibly some fresh one.

red pill or blue pill? :D

Hmmm, Can I just take a pill and have sound on my pc again? I wish! [img]smile.gif[/img]

Considering my machine behaved very well and very stable until this soundcard driver incident I'm going to try to reinstall first and if that doesn't solve the problem then I will wipe the drive. Well fortunately I am "back-up happy" with regards to my files, so alot of my files are already on cdr. One less step to walk through I suppose.

Thanks again, everyone, for your input and help! My homemade machine has been blessed with over a year of trouble-free use so perhaps time just caught up with it... [img]smile.gif[/img]

Chewie, when you uninstalled those new drivers, did you remove all files used by the sound card? If not try that and reinstall the driver. That way you can be sure that there isn't any newer files left to cause any troubles. Also check that you have sound enabled and not muted. ;)

Thanks for the input ya'll.

I am happy to announce that 12 hours after re-installing windows my computer randomly promped me for my win 89 disk and proceeded to load some files and now my sound works perfect and my PC runs better than ever.

I feel like I have been through the PC twilight zone, but I have made through unscathed! :D

*cue up twilight zone music*

Thanks again! [img]smile.gif[/img]