Drivers keep going missing

[Avalanche 0]

A friend of mine bought a new case for his computer and after he transfered all his hardware into the new case, both his sound card and his video card don't work correctly.

 

His sound card now loses its driverson every reboot

and

his video card will install the drivers and display 2D just fine, but will not display anything in 3D, opengl or Direct3D

 

No hardware or software changes were made, all he did was transfer the components into this new case.

 

I looked over his hardware install and everything seems fine, the cards are seated properly, and there is nothing grounding to the box. This is a new one on me, it's obviosly related the the transfer over, but how?

 

His specs, as best I can remember right now are:

Athlon 1.4Ghz

Gigabyte GA-7VTXE+ (kt266a)

512 Mb PC2100

 

Sound is a Hercules Fortissimo II

Video is a Hercules Kyro2 64Mb

 

I'm not sure about the hard drives.

 

Any info you guy might have would be great. I've exhausted all I know.

 

Oops, forgot. He's running Win2k Pro sp2, and we've tried all types of driver versions.

[ewaite 0]

Is it possible that he switched PCI Slots when putting everything back together. Win2k sometimes freaks if you move a PCI card to a different slot without first uninstalling the hardware in Device Manager. Also check to make sure the video card isn't sharing an IRQ with something else (Sound, NIC, etc). You can check by going Start=>Run=>msinfo32.exe then expanding "Hardware Resources" and selecting "Conflicts/Sharing".

[Sampson 0]

As ewaite said you may have the cards plugged in an order different than W2K "remembers". You might do this for a start. The Ga-7VTXE+ 's most recent bios is dated Mar. 21, 2002. It is designated F4. If the Bios designation is a lesser number, Go here http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/home/a_bios.htm and download this utility. After downloading it, double click on it while still connected to the net. It will flash your bios over the net. Sometimes with a new bios upgrade, the order in which W2K recognizes the cards reorders their IRQ designation. On AMD machines there is frequently conflicts between the NIC and the video card.

On other thought, make sure that your CD writer has DMA support. For whatever reason, sometimes this gets changed to PIO.

[Uykucu 0]

For another immediate solution of freaking w2k, you might wanna go to the uninstall unplug device applet, select show hidden devices. and install all instances of your sound NIC and Video card.

Have the drivers handy though, you are going to need them big time, when you reboot.

 

There might be a problem of no video whic in that case boot i to the safe mode, remove the VGA driver (the one that windows uses to display under any circumstance.) from the system applet, install your video driver whola!

 

BTW if you are not confident about this, just call somebody in, or take the machine to somebody who knows what he/she is doing. It can get messy and cause a great amount of hair to be lost in a short period.

[Avalanche 0]

Thanks for the tips. I will try everything of friday when I get over to his system again. I did already try to look for conflicts, and there where none.

 

It's strange, but the sound card will install fine and work alright for a couple reboots, but then seamingly randomly it'll lose the drivers on a reboot. At least this is what my friend is telling me, he may be wrong about it. (Trouble shooting by proxy, not the best way to go about thing, I know.)

 

I will do some experiments with the video card, I had trouble similar to what was going on with my old Voodoo3.

 

Again, thanks, you're helpful as always.

[Avalanche 0]

Okay, I updated the BIOS and did that driver reinstall that Uykucu recommended.

 

I noticed something a couple things that seemed a bit odd to me about his system. Most computers using ACPI share a lot of devices on IRQ 11, but not his. His system doesn't have anything using IRQ 11, but his sound card and video card are sharing IRQ 16. Another strange bit is the BIOS for his motherboard doesn't have any setting for Assign IRQ to VGA, The Kyro2 card doesn't require this, but I thought since hs sound and video are sharing IRQ 16 that if I set this in the BIOS that it might help, but I can't.

 

His mobo does however have a lot of settings to manually set IRQs to all of the PCI slots, I tried that, but Windows just ignores the settings when I boot back into windows.

 

So basically, there's no improvement. Thanks though for your help, I'll feep trying though, and I'll let you guys know if I figure it out.

[Uykucu 0]

Himm, manualy assigning IRQ's on a PnP OS is a lost cause. I suggest you leave them on auto config, set the PnP Os to yes in the board.

Assign IRQ to VGA does not exist on all machines. Here i am using an Asus CUSL2 and it does not have that setting either (i think) since most of the new VGA cards does not require that setting, at least i have not seen anything that does need it for a very long time.

 

Not using IRQ 11 is also no sign of trouble, since it depends on what the OS likes. I just checked out of curiosity and from 3 machines here @ home only 1 is using IRQ 11 for a single device.. all works fine, with full ACPI. But two of the shares IRQ 9 quite heavily.

 

Just a thought. Is the bios holding the settings you make, does it reset if you power down for 5-6 hours? If so it might have a faulty battery, which causes ESCD to reset and OS to find everything new again. If not i am out of ideas. Maybe someone more experienced with finer points of tweaking might be helpful or somebody else who has the same board and problem.

[Avalanche 0]

No, I know that not using IRQ 11 is not necessarily bad, and I also know that with an ACPI machine manually configuring IRQs doesn't do too much. I was just covering all bases. I mentioned Assign IRQ to VGA because the info on the hercules page for their Kyro2 cards said that it is a good idea to set this.

 

Mainly I am concerned because it's rare to see sharing of IRQs on such a high number. They are shared on IRQ 16.

 

And no, there's no trouble with the bios holding info, I've checked that out. Everything holds fine, even after it had been powered down for over 2 days.

 

I'm gonna tell him to take the danged thing to the shop. Not that I think those guys are more skilled (I know every computer tech in this cruddy town, none of them know much), but they have the facilities to do more indepth analysis.

 

Thanks for the help there, Uykucu.

[CyberGenX 0]

Power supply. I have seen this before and if it is not the PCI slot issue, you may have a bunk PS.

[Avalanche 0]

Yeah, that's been in the back of my mind the whole time. The PSU is the only new component in his system since he changed things over to this new case.

 

I advised him to use this new PSU cause it's an AOpen that is on the AMD approved list, and the one he was using isn't. I guess that's the one last thing to check. That would be a big bugger, cause it's a nice PSU, and you can't return just that part of the case without sending the whole case back. I'll give that a shot, plugging the old PSU back in.

[pmistry 0]

Uhhh guys THERE IS NO IRQ 16.....it goes from 0-15 only.

[sapiens74 0]

Actually there are 32 IRQ's I believe they are "imaginary"

[pmistry 0]

Seriously?

If they are imaginary do they still show up in device manager?

[Avalanche 0]

They sure do. There are devices on IRQ 16, 17 and 19 on my friend's system.

 

Should I take a screenshot of the device manager?

[Avalanche 0]

Well I think I got it. Thanks CyberGen, I think you had the right idea. But the weird thing is that there is nothing wrong with that AOpen PSU. We went to the computer shop and the guy gave us a couple of the same model to test, after he couldn't find anything wrong.

 

Seems there is a strange issue between that Gigabyte mobo, and that AOpen PSU. We reinstalled his old PSU, which is only a 250Watt, and everything works fine. Now I'm just worried about lack of juice. He's got 4 case fans, 2 hard drives, 2 cd drives, and an Athlon cpu running. I bet if he upgrades his video card to a more power hungry model, like a GeForce the current PSU will bug out.

 

Oh well, at least I got it. Seriously, thanks guys for all the input. This forum is really great.

[Uykucu 0]

We aim to please

[pmistry 0]

Avalanche, I believe you no need for a screenshot

Yeah, I've been to forums everywhere, but this place is the best, no mudslinging contests here [well most of the time].

[Avalanche 0]

I hope people will still read this thread.

 

Bad news. His old 250Watt psu was just not up to the task of powering his system, with all the fans and such. So he bought a really nice Antec 400Watt. Great psu, on AMD's approved list (well it was, before AMD decided they didn't need one anymore).

 

Guess what? Same exact problem as with the AOpen psu happens with the new Antec.

 

Both the Antec and AOpen are P4 ATX 2.03 compliant psu's, but the old 250Watter was not. Could this have anything to do with his problem? It seems unlikely to me, but I feel like anything's a possibility. Even if some ATX mobos have trouble with ATX 2.03, a board as new as the Gigabyte GA-7VTXE+ should be perfectly fine with it. We took it to the shop, to see if those guys there can help out.

 

This is possibly the strangest issue I've ever seen.

[Uykucu 0]

I am not totally sure but it sounds too weird to be accurate.

a PSU may effect many things in a computer, ESCD is not one of them.

Nor is the IRQ settings and the OS installing drivers.

 

I will look in to it today.

[Avalanche 0]

Well, he got his system back from the shop, and $85 later, they didn't fix anything, infact the problem is worse. Now instead of just not running 3D, it'll crash the system when you try to play a game (no BSOD or eventlog, just hard feeze), and if you leave it on for more than 5 minutes, the mouse and keybord stop responding, the system doesn't freeze when this happens, I know because when I hit the power button to shut it off, it flashes the "Windows is shutting down" window for a second or two before it turns off.

 

This is getting weirder and weirder. The guy at the computer shop said he's gonna start swapping out components tomorrow and see if any one of them is at fault. I hope for my friend's sake it's not anything too expensive, labour alone is gonna cost an arm and a leg.

 

All I can think is I'm glad my system isn't having troubles like this.

[Uykucu 0]

I give Up!!!

Anybody has any sensible suggestions please help him.

[Avalanche 0]

Hey, thanks Uykucu, don't worry about it. I'm glad you've stuck with me as far as you have. I'm gonna give up too.

 

The tech at the shop said he thinks the mobo is fried, and I suppose anything's possible. Oh well. I'm glad you helped as much as you did. This guy has the worst luck with computers, I'm telling you, it's spooky.