Dave-H

Well, I've just spent a frustrating afternoon trawling the web for information about IRQ steering problems in Windows 98. I'm still trying to get my sound hardware to work again before I even think of going any further with NUSB! Didn't actually get very far. It does appear to be an IRQ allocation problem, but I can't think why it should have suddenly happened, or how to resolve it. If only I had some old copies of system.dat and user.dat.............. I'm sure that the key to solving the sound problem lies in finding out why one of the "APCI IRQ Holder for PCI IRQ Steering" devices is disabled. I've tried removing and reinstalling the sound drivers, and removing the relevant system devices and letting the system reinstall them, and it always comes back the same. I do have one clue, which I should have mentioned straight away. While I was trying to resolve the system freezes I was getting with my multi-drive USB stick and card readers, I rebooted at one point and found that my system BIOS seemed to have reset itself to its defaults for some reason, and I had to go though the BIOS settings and put them back as they should be. Is it possible that some setting has become corrupted that isn't manually correctable? I've been though the settings umpteen times and I can't see anything wrong, and I'm pretty sure that all the settings are as they were before the problem occurred. There are no settings in the BIOS that directly relate to the sound hardware, and the sound does work perfectly in Windows 2000 so I had been assuming that there couldn't be an actual hardware or BIOS problem. The PCI bus IRQ steering settings are all at the defaults, as they have always been. I tried switching IRQ steering off, and what happened was that the sound harware is now shown as having sensible resource settings (but still can't load the device drivers) and my Intel on-board ethernet card was disabled, saying that it needed IRQ steering on to work! Putting it on again just put things back as they were before. I hate hardware resource problems like this........

Thanks Den. I had already tried that before, removing the sound driver and letting the plug and play system reinstall it, but it never made any difference. I will try removing the sound driver software this time first before I do it, and that will probably make the system unable to find a driver for the sound hardware, unless there is a generic Microsoft driver for it. Then I'll reinstall the Realtek package and see what happens. I'll report back in a while, I'm off to bed (it's one o'clock in the morning here!)

OK, I'd like to get my sound working again before we go any further. I want to start with NUSB again with a completely working system. I have backed up my Windows 98 and Windows 2000 folders, and their Program Files folders, onto a removable hard drive, so I hope I'm covered in case of disaster. The problem with the sound suddenly appeared while I was trying to troubleshoot the original NUSB installation. I became aware that the sound was not working, but all seemed OK in Device Manager at that time, so I thought I would carry on with the troubleshooting and investigate the loss of sound later. I then later became aware that there was a problem showing in Device Manager, but i don't know at what point it appeared. The sound hardware (Realtek AC'97 Audio) is showing a yellow exclamation mark. The general properties show - "The NTKERN.VXD, MMDEVLDR.VXD device loader(s) for this device could not load the device driver. (Code 2.) To fix this, click Update Driver to update the device driver". Needless to say, I've done that until I'm blue in the face and it makes absolutely no difference! I'm using the latest driver (4.06) and the driver installation appears to go without any problems. More puzzling, the Resources tab shows - "The resources this device is using do not match any of its known configurations. To assign resources manually for this device, click Set Configuration Manually." If I click to set the resources, there are no conflicts shown, but the device is shown as using Interrupt Request "00". which is surely not correct. I'm pretty sure that it used to be using IRQ 11. Needless to say, if I try and change it, all I get is "This resource setting cannot be modified"! Everything else on the system seems to be functioning correctly except the sound. The only other clue I've had is by using a utility called "HP System Diagnostics", which came with my HP printer. This has a function to analyse the devices registered by the system, and you can delete any that you want to (presumably the same as you would by going into Safe Mode.) This shows eight "APCI IRQ Holder for PCI IRQ Steering" devices. I think this is one each for the five PCI card slots, plus the AGP slot and the ethernet and sound controllers, which are part of the motherboard. One of them is shown as being disabled, and I'll bet it's the one for the sound hardware! The question is, how do I enable it? It doesn't show up in Device Manager, as presumably it's a hidden device, and unlike the Windows 2000 Device Manager, there seems to be no way in Windows 98 of getting Device Manager to show hidden devices. So, any suggestions? Thanks in anticipation.

Well thanks to you guys, especially jaclaz, I've fixed by pen drive! I used a package I downloaded from here - http://depositfiles.com/en/files/dd0oeig46 This included the USB 2K REL90 program jaclaz referred to, as well as a lot of other related programs (including Chip Genius). I don't think that they are all the latest versions of the programs, but they work, and the USB 2K REL90 program fixed things for me. I did try using the separately downloaded Phison MPTool MP2232, but I couldn't get my head around that. It seemed to need device information data files from Phison, which I didn't have of course. I managed to get the pen drive to work as a single 2GB drive, and then just for the hell of it I thought I would try and restore it back to as it was originally (mode 7). This I did, so it's now back exactly as it was before, but with my own personalised device ID! Works perfectly in Windows 2000 and Windows 98 (with its own driver). That has been a very useful exercise, and has taught me an awful lot, although obviously it's not particularly relevant to the original problem! So, the original problem.......... I now have Windows 98 back as far as it's possible to do to the way it was before I first installed NUSB. So, where do i go from here? I'd still like to have NUSB on the system, but I need to know how to best avoid the same thing happening again as happened before.

OK, I downloaded the Phison MPTool MP2232 1.11.0. Is that the one to try first? You'll have to guide me through how to use it, I'm a bit out of my depth here!

Hi guys! I know this isn't directly anything to do with fixing my Integral drive, but bear with me. I have now found an earlier version of a backup of my Windows 98 registry, which goes back to September. I tried using it to see if I could get the sound back, but it didn't work for that. Unfortunately it's not a full backup copy of system.dat and user.dat. What it is an exported text file from the registry backup function of Norton Registry Editor. What it unfortunately doesn't include is the hardware configuration data. Anyway, having done this, and at least restored the installation information and root key information from some weeks ago, I decided to try and restore the Windows 98 system back as much as possible to as it was before it ever saw NUSB. Fortunately I log most installations using Norton Cleansweep, and this generates a log file of every change that the installer makes to the system. I did log the NUSB installation, so I was able to manually remove all the files that it was recorded as having put on the system. I then reinstalled the manufacturers' Windows 98 drivers for my original four port card reader, and the Integral USB stick. The four card reader now works fine again, and I checked that my USB ZIP drive also works correctly. The integral USB stick, with its own driver, now installs in Windows 98 exactly as it does in Windows 2000. That is to say, it appears as two separate drives, but inaccessible. Windows 2000 says they have an unknown file system on them, Windows 98 says they have a FAT file system on them, but they are shown as being of zero size and cannot be formatted. The point I'm getting to is that Windows 98 now treats the stick exactly the same way as Windows 2000, therefore it is extremely unlikely that any registry corruption in Windows 2000 is causing the problem, unless exactly the same condition now exists in Windows 98. I think the stick itself is damaged in that it now contains storage space but with no storage volumes on it. To repair it we need to restore the volume information. I did find a copy of the security program for the stick. Fortunately I had kept another copy in addition to the one on the stick itself. It allows you to lock and unlock the stick with password protection, and change the relative size of the "public" and "protected" sections of the stick. Unfortunately it doesn't now work to repair the stick. It runs OK and you can tell it to change the sizes, a progress bar goes across and it says "writing files" which looks very hopeful (the light on the stick even flashes!) but after it's finished in Windows 2000 the stick is no different. In Windows 98 the program usually crashes at this point anyway!

Went out this morning and bought a new HP 2GB flash drive (v125w). It works fine in Windows 2000 of course , and also works fine in Windows 98, appearing as a single removable drive. However if I put either of my multi-card readers into Windows 98, the same thing happens as before. The first drive seems to mount correctly, but as soon as the second drive mounts the system freezes. So, it looks as if the only problem with my NUSB installation is simply that it cannot mount more than one drive at a time without freezing the system. Presumably from the experience of others this is not a known and expected issue with NUSB. So, why is this happening? Is there still a conflict somewhere with some old software that either hasn't been uninstalled or hasn't uninstalled properly? If so, why does the install only fail the second time and not straight away when the first drive mounts? Can I now get my old Integral flash drive working again in Windows 2000? Not the end of the world if I've hosed it completely by deleting the volumes from it, but it would be nice to get it working again if possible. After all that, will my sound ever work again in Windows 98? So many questions...........

Yes, that's exactly what it is. Your reference to the Apple forum has an entry where Integral support seem to be telling someone that the two partitions on the drive cannot be combined. No wonder I can't get it to be seen as one drive, except apparently by DOS! Whether I can now get it working properly again after deleting the volumes from it remains to be seen. Thanks guys, I really appreciate this! I will do what you suggest and go and buy a new memory stick, and see what that does. I have guests today so there may be a slight delay before I report back. I just hope I don't buy another one and find that it's two drives in one as well! There was no indication on the drive I have that it was divided like that. Of course the original problem was with a card reader that is actually five drives, so the problem won't be solved until we can find out why Windows 98 with NUSB won't mount more than one drive without freezing.

Indeed so, that's exactly what it now looks like, a card reader with no card in it. Done all that, seemed to work OK. Removed a load of stuff with USBDeview. CleanAfterMe had an option to presumably remove "Installed USB Devices" but that looked a bit drastic so I left it. Put the stick back in, no difference at all! However, at the risk of muddying the waters, I do have to report something that happened over on Windows 98. I was trying to find out why my sound hardware isn't working on Windows 98, even with the restored registry. It looks like it can't find an IRQ to use. Anyway, I tried the uninstalling in safe mode option, removing the sound hardware, and the IRQ steering devices, one of which was reported as being disabled for some reason. I also removed the USB2 controller that NUSB had installed support for, and stopped it being detected by disabling the USB2.INF file. I figured that possibly this extra device had messed up the IRQ allocation system. Well, it didn't fix the sound problem, and I now have the USB2 controller as an unused device. Just for the hell of it I stuck the USB stick back in, and it found it as before as two "Disk Drives". I tried updating the driver on the first of these Disk Drives in Device Manager, not thinking that it would do anything as I'm sure I'd tried that before and been told that the best driver was already installed. Well, this time I was prompted for the USBMPHLP.PDR file. I said OK, and to my amazement, the drive became a "Removable Drive". I then found I could assign drive letters to it, I gave it drive I:, and it duly appeared in My Computer. I double clicked on it, and there was an almost 2GB empty drive, at last! I didn't try putting any files on it. I rebooted, and it all stayed the same. Next, of course, I tried the same thing with the other "Disk Drive". Well, everything went the same until I pointed it at the USBMPHLP.PDR file, and then yes, you've guessed it, instant system freeze. So I'm now back where I was before, and the system freezes as soon as I put the drive into the USB socket. It does I think prove one thing, that one drive will install OK, but it won't install any subsequent drives on the same device without the system locking up. It also shows that the pen drive can be read on Windows 98, at least the first bit of it, but Windows 2000 now won't read it. I'm wondering it we're missing something obvious here. Is it possible the the pen drive does actually contain two physical devices, rather than one partitioned device? The fact that DOS can only see one device might just be a limitation of the USB system under DOS. Just a thought.

Well, either of them really, but let's concentrate on the USB stick if everyone else is happy to, because I'm learning a lot here! Actually I think that Chip Genius is showing the stick as two drives, it's just that the screen grab isn't clear enough. Here's the relevant detail - This is what it looks like in Disk Manager - And this is what it looks like in Device Manager -

I did install the HDD Low Level Format Tool in Windows 2000. It still doesn't work. Here's what Chip Genius reports about my pen drive - I have used the Scrubber utility, and it did remove a lot of things, but made no difference to the problem with the drive being seen as two drives. Anyway, I do have progress to report with Windows 98. I finally managed to restore a version of the registry from a few days ago, which has put me back to the original scenario. My sound hardware is still not working, rather surprisingly, but that's a problem for another thread! The scenario I'm back with now is that when I plug the memory stick in, it is detected (still as two drives!) with no freezes, and the two drives appear as "disk drives" (NOT removable drives) in Device Manager. The NUSB system tray icon is there, and shows them correctly as that. However, I can't use them as I can't assign any drive letters to them. So, we're back there again! Sorry, but I have no registry backups from before I installed NUSB. So, where from here........?

But shouldn't the tool show all the drives on the system? Even if it can't read the memory stick, it should still show the other drives surely, not just throw up an error message. The message still comes up with the stick unplugged BTW. What I don't understand is that all DOS utilities show it as a single FAT32 drive. Only Windows 2000 now sees it as two unformatted "empty" drives. I don't think that there is anything wrong with the drive, just that Windows 2000 is mis-detecting it. I have searched the registry for "Filter Driver" and found the following - eBoostr caching filter driver (don't know why this is there, I briefly tried out and uninstalled eBoostr ages ago) NetGroup Packet Filter Driver Iomega Devices Disk Filter Driver (must go with my USB ZIP drive) IP Traffic Filter Driver IPX Traffic Filter Driver PCCS Mode Change Filter Driver (Nokia PC Connectivity Solution, used with my cell phone) Digital CD Audio Playback Filter Driver Serenum Filter Driver Nothing which seems to relate to USB drives.

@Multibooter I do have anti-virus installed (Trend PC-cillin 2002, old but still seems to work fine and I update the definitions every week) and have no reason the think that there are any viruses on the system. It's a while since I did a complete system scan (although PC-cillin has a real-time scan function that works all the time anyway.) Yes, I still have those backups of the Windows 98 registry from the install. I do have Norton Utilities (2002) and did make a Rescue Disk set, so I'll have that too. They are ancient though! I'd have to reinstall every single thing on the system, and that doesn't bear thinking about. @dencorso I didn't partition the pen drive at all, it was that way when I bought it! It's an "Integral" 2GB drive, don't know a model number. Norton Diskedit sees it just fine. Any idea what's wrong with the Hard Disk Low Level Format Tool BTW?

@jaclaz Sorry it seemed that I wasn't co-operating with you, it just seemed that looking into the registry was the way to go as a first line of enquiry. I was also a bit loathe to go down too many other avenues while still in the middle of troubleshooting with dencorso. I was worried that things were going to get horribly confused if I wasn't careful! I don't have access to another computer to try the drive on I'm afraid. @dencorso I've downloaded and installed the HDD Low Level Format v2.36 program, but it doesn't seem to be working properly. When I run it, a message box pops up saying "Error accessing device: incorrect function." If I click OK another box pops up saying "Cannot change Visible in OnShow or OnHide". If I clear that, the program's windows comes up, but no devices are shown. Not having a lot of luck at the moment...........

My understanding is that Scanreg runs when Windows 98 starts, and if it's happy that the registry is OK, it makes a backup, on the first boot of each day only. All backups should be "startable" therefore, but I have had problems in the past with scanreg backups that won't restore, and never found out why. I have one rbbad.cab in my \SysBackup folder, generated late on Saturday evening. I haven't done any manual backups using scanreg for a long time, although I always do it if I've made a large change to the system.

Thanks jaclaz! The guy you tried to help on that thread wasn't too helpful himself was he! I have just tried removing the registry entry for the USB stick under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USBSTOR No joy there though, when I rebooted and put the stick back in, it just reinstalled as two "dead" drives again! I'm curious, what exactly are "Upper and Lower Filter Drivers"? Not something I've come across before.

Thanks again guys. I actually already had that version of Ranish Partition Manager on my system, which I had completely forgotten about as I haven't needed to use it for so long! Anyway, the USB stick is seen by RPM, as a single 2GB partition, as I would expect. So, what's the next step Den? Going off topic, I'm now having the very devil of a job getting the sound to work again on Windows 98. The driver for the sound hardware (on-board Realtek AC97) will not load. Everything else seems to be back to normal. I did try restoring the registry back to as it was before, but this didn't fix the problem. I am also rather worried that four out of the five backups I had from scanreg don't work. If I use scanreg/restore in DOS, I'm offered all five, but four of them just throw up a "system restore failed" message, no reason given.........

Done that. When it's detected again, it still detects as two separate drives, which appear as I: and J: in "My Computer". Neither can be formatted as "there is no disk in the drive"!

I'm now trying to re-partition my memory stick as a single drive, but I'm running into a puzzling problem. To cut a long story short, I deleted all the volumes on the drive, and it still shows as two drives in Windows 2000 Explorer, but with "no disk in them". I eventually resorted to going into DOS (I can access USB drives in DOS) and using fdisk to delete all the partitions on the drive. I then used fdisk again to create one primary DOS partition, and formatted it with the DOS format command. It now appears in DOS as one single 2GB drive, which is what I want. However, Windows 2000 still insists on seeing it as two separate drives, with no file system on them. Do I need to install a third party drive partition utility to get this to work? The "DISKPART" command in Windows 2000 Recovery Console doesn't see the drive at all. I have tried it again in Windows 98 BTW, but with the same result, two drives detected followed by a system freeze.

Thanks for the quick response guys! The USBMPHLP.PDR file version is 4.90.3000, which I think is correct for a Windows ME file. It's paired in the driver list of the devices with IOS.VXD, whic id 4.10.2225, a Windows 98SE file. Is that OK? I will do a backup of Windows 98 as it now is. As I have Windows 2000 on the machine as well, would it be adequate to just use Windows 2000 to copy the Windows and Program Files folders to another drive? I have a drive E: archive drive where I store all my documents, with no system files on it, I could store the backups there. I could re-partition my memory stick to a single partition using Windows 2000 too if you think that would eliminate one possible problem.

Hi guys! Thanks so much for all this, and sticking with it. Just to let you know where I am now. I had already used scanreg to restore previous backups of the registry when I was experimenting with this much earlier on. It is an excellent facility which has saved my bacon several times over the years, and it's always puzzled me as to why NT based systems don't have it. Maybe the backup files would be too large or something. I have a Windows 98 Resource Kit utility which allow parameters such as the number of backups and which files are backed up to be changed using a graphical interface. I expect you're aware that no matter how high you set the number of backups to be, the DOS version of scanreg will still only display five of them. Very silly! Anyway, I tried restoring the backups of system.dat and user.dat that Den had me make. Unfortunately they wouldn't work, on boot up I got a screen saying that registry corruption had been detected and telling me to run scanreg. If I ignored that, after a series of BSODs the system loading never completed. So, I did run scanreg as Bill told me to, and of course it just restored a backup, presumably the last one that started successfully. Once the system was up and running again, I exported the Enum registry key to a backup, deleted it, and restarted. I then went through all the automatic and manual device installation procedures, which took ages of course, but I've now got everything installed again apart from a few peripherals that I seldom use. I'll deal with them later! The only thing still not working is the sound, so I've got to sort that, but it can wait too. So, I put my pen drive in the slot (I'm using that for all the tests now as it's the simplest device, if that works I'm sure the card readers will too.) I was very disappointed to find that nothing had changed! It's doing exactly the same as it was before I reinstalled all the devices. I put the drive in the USB slot, it says it's found a "Mass Storage Device". That installs correctly, all well and good. It then says it's found a "Removable USB Disk", then a "USB Disk". It then does this again a second time, as my pen drive is partitioned into two drives. Unfortunately, as soon as "USB Disk" comes up the second time, the system freezes. No error messages or anything. Sometimes the hourglass keeps going round and round, but the keyboard is immediately completely dead. The mouse carries on working for a short while, although clicking on things does nothing, and eventually that freezes too. It's as if the whole operating system has just stopped running, and I have to do a hard reset. After this, putting the pen drive in just freezes the system immediately. If I try and boot with the pen drive in, the GUI never loads, it just hangs on a flashing cursor. So, all that uninstalling and reinstalling seems to have done nothing. The driver being used seems to be USBMPHLP.PDR, in the System\IOSubsys folder. If I disable this by renaming the file (I usually disable files be replacing the middle character in the file extension with a tilda (~) BTW) the detection and loading procedure for the pen drive does complete. I then have two USB Drives in Device Manager, as I would expect, but non functional with yellow marks on them of course as the driver file is missing. If I reactivate USBMPHLP.PDR the system freezes agian as soon as I put the pen drive into the USB port. So, it seems that the loading, or attempting to load, USBMPHLP.PDR is freezing the system. Why? Well, over to you two again.

Ah, thanks for explaining that Den! Multibooter, yes I had noticed that the NUSB uninstall routine doesn't roll things back to normal very much at all! I use a USB mouse, but the keyboard is a good old fashioned PS2 device.

Sadly, no. Did all that. Why the ".ant" and ".pnt" extensions as a matter of interest? Any significance to those, or would anything actually do? A lot of things just installed anyway and I couldn't stop them. Well, everything seemed to go OK, but what's happening now is that when I insert the pen drive, I'm offered two possible drivers, "Mass Storage Device 11/16/07" and "Mass Storage Driver 4/22/99". If I use the latter, it installs OK, but I've still got a "Mass Storage Device" in the Device Manager with a red mark beside it. If I use the former (which seems to be the most likely anyway) it does install the driver correctly. Unfortunately, what happens then is that messages pop up saying the system has found "Removable USB Disk" which sounds very hopeful, but then it pops up another message saying found "USB Disk" and the system freezes. No response at all with the mouse and keyboard completely dead. I have to hard reset, and if I then plug the pen drive in, the same sequence repeats, followed by a system freeze again. I've tried reinstalling the pen drives own Windows 98 driver software, and that now doesn't work either, even after uninstalling NUSB. It does sound much more correct for the device to be a "Removable USB Disk" rather than just a "Disk Drive" which is what I was getting before. I doubt that was the right type of drive, which is probably why it wouldn't let me assign any drive letters. It was possibly being detected as a fixed disk, which I think in Windows 98 you can only assign drive letters to using fdisk. Any more suggestions? Thanks, Dave.

Well I've done a lot of web research on this problem, but without any definite conclusions. My USB pen drive has the same problem now, it's detected as two disk drives (it's partitioned) but no drive letters assigned and apparently no way of assigning any! "Removable" is unchecked by default on all the drives, and "int 13 unit" is checked and greyed out on all of them. I've tried changing them to removable drives (which surely they should be) and forcing "int 13 unit" off by editing the registry. Nothing makes any difference though, still no drive letters appear in the "Reserved drive letters" dropdowns. I also have a USB Iomega ZIP drive, and I removed it from the USB devices too. When I reconnected that it worked fine, it appears as a drive, and drive letters can be assigned to it. So how come that works, and the other drives don't? I'd love to be able to "restore my system" but this is Windows 98, not ME with a "System Restore" facility! This has got to be something really simple, everything including NUSB seems to be working perfectly, including a "Stop Hardware" icon in the system tray like Windows 2000, which I've never seen before! It's just the drive letter assignment that isn't working, almost like they're the wrong sort of drives or something. I've tried updating the drivers on the drives (it says no driver files have been loaded for them) and it says I'm already using the best driver (DISKDRV.INF) for them. The drives are appearing in Device Manager just as "Disk drive". Should they be appearing as something else, like "Removable drive"? I can't remember what they appeared as before....... Any more ideas anyone?

Thanks guys! I've managed to get it to work now up to a point. The problem was being caused by some old card reader software that I hadn't uninstalled, doh! NUSB has now installed properly, and my card reader is being recognised correctly. The only thing still not right is that the card reader is shown as a Mass Storage Device in Device Manager and has generated four new disk drives, which is what I would expect. They don't appear in My Computer though, as they have no drive letters assigned to them. If I try to assign drive letters to them using Device Manager, there are no drive letters shown in the drop-down boxes, they are completely blank! How on earth do I resolve that?! Cheers, Dave.