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Problem Installing Card Reader [Solved]


Dave-H

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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!)

:)

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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.
Yes. nusb must be installed upon a clean base. This may take a little while.

I went against the recommendation of Maximus Decim and have not removed the USB 2.0 controllers before installing nusb. Removing the USB 2.0 controllers would also have meant uninstalling the driver and setup for my HP2605dn color-duplex USB network printer, which was just as complicated to install as nusb. I am using Orangeware v2.4.1 for all USB 2.0 PCCards and USB 2.0 hubs. I am not aware of any problems caused by continuing with the existing USB 2.0 controllers.

If you want to use nusb for some devices and manufacturer-provided drivers for other USB 2.0 mass storage devices (incl. USB HDD, USB DVD drives, USB HDD docking stations), you have to:

1) uninstall all manufacturer-provided USB 2.0 mass storage drivers (check Add/Remove)

2) install nusb on a clean base

3) de-activate nusb

4) re-install the manufacturer-provided driver

5) detect the new device with the manufacturer-provided driver on ALL USB connectors

6) activate nusb again

Each manufacturer-provided driver may add its own safely-remove icon to the system tray. The safely-remove icon of nusb is really amazing, it even works with a SCSI Jaz-drive connected to an Adaptec 1460 SCSI PCMCIA card: after safely removing the SCSI Jaz drive via the nusb icon, I can pull the Adaptec SCSI PCMCIA card, to which the SCSI Jaz drive is connected, out of the laptop, and everything continues to work fine, even ScanDisk! This means that before installing nusb you may have to uninstall also old SCSI stuff ...

About 2 months ago, after I had test-installed Iosys98.exe plus Q277628.exe together, which shouldn't be done, a single Jaz drive appeared with SEVEN drive letters and icons in My Computer, maybe because I hadn't uninstalled the drivers for my SCSI PCCards/PCMCIA Cards, or some other SCSI devices, before installing nusb.

Before I installed nusb, I installed Driver Magician. By having Driver Magician back up all drivers (incl.MS), I got a list of the drivers installed on my system, to make sure I didn't forget to remove something before installing nusb. During the house-cleaning before installing nusb, I removed old Netscape Communicator 4.80, which was quite a task. BTW, the instability problem of Adobe Acrobat 5.0 on my system disappeared after removing Netscape.

Looking back at the amount of time I spent preparing a clean base for installing nusb, I might just as well have created another opsys selection in my boot menu and installed a 2nd, fresh new Win98 opsys, with nusb installed from the start, in addition to the original Win98 opsys with manufacturer-provided drivers.

Edited by Multibooter
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As far as I can tell, how well NUSB works is very hardware dependent. On my HP Pavilion with a Stratitec USB card, both NUSB and Orangeware drivers work great. On my Gateway 2000 which has a different USB card (I forget the brand) that uses native drivers, it doesn't work well at all. I just purchased a couple of flash drives (a 2GB Sandisk U3 and an HP 4GB) and a 4 port USB hub. On the HP, I can plug both flash drives, my external hard drive and a USB mouse into the hub, and after the normal driver detection and installing, I can move data from one USB device to another with no problems. On the Gateway, trying to copy or execute files on the external drive caused blue screens, "unable to write data" errors. It could not consistently detect the flash drives when I plugged them in. If I unplug a flash drive, then plug it back in, the Gateway PC rarely detects it again unless I reboot. On the HP, I can add and remove them at will. Oddly enough, the external hard drive isn't visible in "unplug or eject hardware" on the HP, but it is on the Gateway.

On the HP, USB devices work equally well with 98FE, 98SE, and 2K. On the Gateway, 98FE and SE both work poorly. Haven't tried 2K on it yet. I'd need to swap the USB cards between the 2 to determine if it's the cards or the PCs hardware that's the limiting factor. That's a bigger job than I have time to do right now. For now, I'm going to try a DOS CD that has USB drivers. It works well on the HP with the external hard drive. Haven't tried it with the hub or flash drives. Except for the BIOS, it will remove the OSs and drivers from the equation and allow me to determine if the hardware is the primary limiting factor on the Gateway.

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The thread pointed to by jaclaz is quite informative and merits careful reading and reflection. So, to add even some more info I take this opportunity to quote one of my older posts, that I thing is relevant here:

In case NUSB 3.3 doesn't work for you (but did you give it a try?), you have the Wintricks driver pack (the download link is on page #6) or RLoew's pack (the download link is on the Prerelease and Beta Software page), both free and both derived from the same Lexar drives. And there is the Win 2k USB 2.0 drivers for 9x/ME (direct download). I'd install USB 3.3 and if it gave me grief, just uninstall its (Win ME) USB 2.0 drivers from the Add/Remove software dialog and then add the Win 2k drivers. If that also doesn't work I'd restore a previously saved full system image to remove all traces of this installation and install one of the lexar derived drivers with the Win 2k USB 2.0 stack. Only if even that doesn't work I'd then just use either NUSB 3.3 without the USB 2.0 stack or one of the Lexar derived drivers stand alone. But without a USB 2.0 stack USB is not very useful, is it?
In any case, Dave-H's Supermicro X5DAE USB sub-system is based on a Intel ICH-4 southbridge, which shouldn't have problems with either USB 2.0 stacks mentioned above. So, I'm sure whatever problems there currently are must be fully software-related, and so, that a good tweaking and experimenting is all that is needed to have everything working as it should.
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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........

:(

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On my HP Pavilion with a Stratitec USB card, both NUSB and Orangeware drivers work great... Oddly enough, the external hard drive isn't visible in "unplug or eject hardware" [=safely-remove icon in System Tray] on the HP, but it is on the Gateway.

Hi herbalist, as I was saying to Dave in posting #2:

Your system has most likely become a little corrupted and all your other USB and SCSI devices may be impacted.
On the HP, I can plug both flash drives, my external hard drive and a USB mouse into the hub, and after the normal driver detection and installing, I can move data from one USB device to another with no problems. On the Gateway, trying to copy or execute files on the external drive caused blue screens, "unable to write data" errors.
On my old Inspiron laptop I have trouble copying between 2 attached USB multipartition 1TB HDDs. I can copy/move little amounts of data Ok between the 2 USB HDDs, but copying/moving maybe > 50MB of data causes sometimes a frozen system and minor repairable disk corruption on the partition of the target HDD, when moving files then also sometimes on the source HDD. The same happens under WinXP and when copying/moving files with Beyond Compare instead of with Win98Se/WinXP Explorer. Maybe because of the old PhoenixBIOS 4.0 Release 6.0 of 1998, but there was also once a similar problem on my desktop with a more recent BIOS.

My workaround is not to transfer data directly between 2 USB mass storage devices (even between a USB DVD-Drive and a USB HDD!), but indirectly via the internal HDD. I try to avoid as much as possible to have two 1TB USB HDDs connected at the same time,

Edited by Multibooter
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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.

How old is the battery?

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You may have the solution at your hands, Dave...

Remember you said:

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.

:no:

OK, then make another full backup of the present state of your 98 boot partition.

Then manually, from DOS, substitute system.dat and user.dat by the ones in your recue disk.

Reboot.

Lots of things won't work anymore, but probably your sound will work ok. Test it.

In case it's ok, go to the device manager and copy the setings it has for the sound card.

Then manually, from DOS, restore the up-to-date system.dat and user.dat.

Reboot.

Enter Device Manager and use the manual configuration to put in place the correct settings for the sound card.

Reboot.

Hunt for conflicts at the Device Manager.

That should be it. Good luck!

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Sure NUSB is great :thumbup , but it is "complex" :wacko:, installing it properly is a nightmare :(
Yes. I have installed nusb on my old Inspiron laptop, but not yet on my dual-core desktop, for the reason dencorso just indicated:
Dave-H's Supermicro X5DAE USB sub-system is based on a Intel ICH-4 southbridge, which shouldn't have problems with either USB 2.0 stacks mentioned above.
My dual-core desktop, in contrast to Dave's computer, has an ICH-5 (Intel 865G on an Asus P5PE-VM motherboard). It requires a special Intel edition of the OrangeWare driver (v1.1.0.2 of 1-Apr-2003) for the ICH-5 USB 2.0 controller.

Maximus Decim has urged removing all USB 2.0 controllers, but I don't know whether nusb is able to handle ICH-5 on Intel 865G. Installing nusb on my old laptop, without uninstalling the OrangeWare driver v2.4.1 before, was also a test of whether nusb would run Ok on top of a pre-existing OrangeWare driver. Eventually I plan to install nusb also on my desktop with more recent hardware, on top of the special Intel edition of the OrangeWare driver for the ICH-5.

Edited by Multibooter
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@herbalist

Yes, the CMOS backup battery was the first thing I thought of when the BIOS re-set itself!

The fact that it hasn't happened again in the last few days makes me think that it probably isn't that, as if the battery were flat I'm sure I'd be losing the settings all the time.

I'm certainly going to keep an eye on it though!

Thanks belatedly for the Test-Run program too.

I had a look at it, and the first thing that the readme says is that Windows has to be installed on drive C:, which it is, and in a folder called "Windows", which it isn't!

My Windows 98 is in a folder called C:\WIN-98, so I suspect that Test-Run won't work.

@dencorso

Unfortunately, the disk I made using Norton Utilities turns out to be only a basic rescue disk, which doesn't include the registry files.

:(

I do have a few other files in my Windows folder which look like they might be registry backups made by other programs, so I will try them and see what happens (after backing up what I've already got of course!)

:)

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Well, just tried a set of old files.

I had a set of files called system.els and user.els, which from their sizes looked like they might actually be backed up registry files. I've no idea what generated them, and a web search didn't reveal anything either.

They are date stamped some time in last March.

Renamed them to system.dat and user.dat, and they worked!

The system booted OK, with registry data from eight months ago.

Unfortunately, the sound still doesn't work, and the entries in Device Manager are exactly the same!

Also the disabled "APCI IRQ Holder for PCI IRQ Steering" is there in the device list exactly the same, and I'm sure it was never like that before.

:no:

Well, this at least proves that the messing about with the registry wasn't what caused the sound problem.

It must be something more fundamental to do with the hardware or the motherboard BIOS, as I feared.

Still doesn't explain why the sound still works fine in Windows 2000 though, but maybe Windows 2000's methods of enumerating devices isn't affected by the problem, but Windows 98's is.

Don't know what to do now.

Dare I re-flash the motherboard BIOS?

I did it once years ago to install an update, and it did work but it scared the life out of me!

I suppose I need to open her up and change that battery too, just to be sure.

:)

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Don't know what to do now.
@dencorso

How about removing the audio controller in Device Manager -> "Sound, video and game controllers", then rebooting to make sure that a yellow question mark appears in Device Manager, then going with a program like Driver Magician online and have the system checked for missing drivers? Also, a driver inventory as created by a program like Driver Magician might give another clue.

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Dave:

Backup your registry, as always. Then explore the various cobinations of settings under these two tabs:

IRQSt.gif

Be aware that some combinations ma render the Win 98 unbootable. If so, just restore the backed up registry from DOS and proceed. The solution may lie here. You might start by disabling IRQ Steereing altogether.

If this idea leads nowhere, then I think the next step is to try the idea Multibooter proposed in the above post.

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Tried changing those settings already.

As I mentioned in a previous post, disabling IRQ steering made the sound hardware show sensible settings under its resources, but didn't bring it to life, and disabled my ethernet controller instead!

Using BIOS instead of Hardware seemed to make no difference at all.

Anyway, surely all these settings are stored in the registry, so if they were wrong restoring an old version should have made things come good, which it didn't!

I'm convinced that the problem is more fundamental than an incorrect registry setting.

I think something has gone wrong on the motherboard itself.

I assume it's not an actual hardware failure, or it wouldn't work in Windows 2000, but I think that something has happened in the BIOS.

For that reason, although I have downloaded it and am willing to try it, I don't think that Driver Magic will show anything that will solve the problem either.

I think I need a piece of software that will analyse the motherboard resources at a very basic OS independent level, to see if the sound hardware is actually being recognised and configured correctly by the BIOS.

:)

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