Marius '95

No, it wasn't that. But I fixed it somehow. Inspired by @defuser, I opened regedit and manually removed all I could find about the old sound cards. Then I manually installed the SoundBlaster non-PnP driver, the one provided by Win98. The sound card appeared in Multimedia and works with the onboard AC97 in SBPro compatiibility mode. I'm doing a backup now, then I'll remove SBPro and install the normal VIA AC97 driver.

Hi! I'm back to MSFN after a very long absence. It's nice to see the Win9x section is still here. I finally have a new (but old) PC that is Win98-compatible and I tried to make it work, but I'm a little rusty after using Win7 and 10 for so long. I need some help. Everyone knows that installing a clean Win98 isn't the most pleasurable experience, especially adding patches, fixes, tweaks, installing programs, configuring everything, etc. I remember it took 2 days to do a full reinstall. So, when I was using Win98 as my main OS, to avoid a full reinstall, I saved a fresh Win98, patched, tweaked and with all my usual programs installed and configured, packed as DriveSpace volume and stored on a CD. When I need a reinstall, I would delete the old DriveSpece volume and restore the saved one from the CD. Unlike WinXP, in Win98 this restore method also worked after major hardware changes, such as replacing the entire computer: I would first boot in Safe Mode, empty the Device Manager except for ACPI, and then reboot in normal mode. After reboot, Win98 would detect all the devices again on the new machine and everything would work as if it was originally installed there. I did this dozens of times and I had no problems. I still have that saved Win98 volume and I tried to use it on this new machine. But this time it didn't work as expected. I have a very weird problem: There are no sound devices available in Control Panel / Multimedia. The Output and Input selection boxes are grayed out, as if no sound cards are installed, but the sound card is OK in Device Manager and the mixer, wave out and FM synth are visible in Multimedia / Advanced tab. I tried with a different card - same problem. Any ideeas what could cause this and how to fix it? I would like to avoid doing a fresh install. Thanks.