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Problem Installing Card Reader [Solved]


Dave-H

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@dencorso

Thanks Den!

That's actually a later version than the printed manual I've got (which is revision 1.1a)!

:thumbup

I will follow up your suggestions when I've done all the analysis with Charlotte, as I'm hoping that might show some way forward without having to open the machine up again!

@CharlotteTheHarlot

Well, I managed to get the information out of Device Manager.

PRN files, I never want to see one ever again!

:angry:

I managed to convert it to plain text (don't ask!) and here it is.

I'm still having no joy with HWinfo.

I'm a bit puzzled when you talk about floppies.

I've been running it in true DOS from the hard drive.

Is that not the way to use it (the documentation is silent as to how to actually deploy the program)?

You mention copying himem.sys to the floppy.

Are you talking about a bootable floppy?

Which config.sys do I modify, the one on the hard drive, in which case why copy himem.sys to a floppy, or a copy of it on a bootable floppy?

Sorry, I'm confused here..........

I tried disabling the USB functions in the BIOS, which you can do (as Den says, the only way to disable the sound hardware is by physically pulling a jumper.)

This didn't bring the sound hardware to life.

:no:

I did notice that in this condition I now had 4 disabled "APCI IRQ Holder for PCI IRQ Steering" devices, number 3, 4, 7 and 8. With the USB enabled only one (7) is disabled.

At least that has shown me that they are disabled because of a problem elsewhere, not that they are causing the problem by being disabled (if you follow me!)

If you can point me to getting HWinfo running properly, I'll let you know its findings so you can compare with what Device Manager says.

If we don't find anything, then it's off with the covers again and we'll follow Den's suggestions.

:)

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Ah yes, I realised after I posted that I'd forgotten about the modem! I don't actually use it now of course, but I've always kept it there as a backup in case my broadband fails (it actually did once, and I had to use the modem again, I'd forgotten how painfully slow dial-up was!)

I hear that! Well if you need it, you need it, but pulling it out and making sure the legacy serial and parallel is turned off in the BIOS usually guarantees that IRQ 3 and 4 is free, ... and in your case, one less device on 11 .... UPDATE: ok i am looking at the Device Manager (DM) listing and see both IRQ3 and IRQ4 are wasted by serial ports. I would suggest they get deleted in DM and then you immediately locate that BIOS setting and disable them so they do not return (note for example : I have USB channels on IRQ 3 and 4 plus separate IRQ Holders) .... UPDATE: looking at the manual dencorso provided, they hid this setting under I/O Device Configuration and a submenu where Serial Port A and B are found.

I have updated the BIOS version to the latest, but I assume that doesn't change the routing table.

Actually this *is* how the BIOS Routing Table changes. You may have noticed when an upgrade is available for a motherboard BIOS it usually adds some features and fixes some bugs. Among the actual changes made when you perform an upgrade are corrections and additions to the Routing Table. The table is located in the programmable BIOS (and in many cases we ourselves can edit the image with BIOS hacking tools and later Flash this modded image back to the Eprom). Anyway, was there a BIOS flashing done before you added the USB reader?

I think I may have discovered what caused that BIOS settings reset.

I used my USB ZIP drive yesterday for the first time in ages, and it worked fine, but I rebooted without unplugging it.

When the system booted up, the BIOS correctly detected the drive after a bit of a pause, and when I rebooted again, the BIOS had reset again!

I think what may be happening is that every time the BIOS detects a new USB device connected to it, it resets itself.

I've no idea why it should do that, but the first reset was probably caused by my rebooting with my USB flash drive plugged in. It therefore probably has no bearing on the sound problem.

I tend to agree. FWIW, I find that having any USB plugged in during bootup to add to the overall bootup time on all versions of Windows. Some Win9x systems also can suffer from periodic hangs with USB devices in during power on/reset/off. And even though it is sometimes impossible I still try to keep USB ports empty to avoid problems. Contrary to what far too many people think, a USB printer does NOT have to be plugged in and powered on before the computer boots! USB actually is Plug and Play (not to be confused with Wintel's PCI Plug and Pray ;-)

There are no reserved resources.

None reserved in here, yes, but those serial ports are effectively doing exactly this ;-)

Well, I managed to get the information out of Device Manager. PRN files, I never want to see one ever again! :angry: I managed to convert it to plain text (don't ask!) and here it is.

Yours must have spooled to the Default Printer! Sorry about those Print To File instructions, I just assumed everyone had the Generic / Text Only printer driver installed. Do you have it in your Control Panel > Printers? If you do then this is how you get that Device Manager listing into an ASCII text file:

Device Manager > Computer > Print > All Devices > Print To File > Setup > Specific Printer > Generic / Text Only on FILE:.

If you don't have it, you do Start > Settings > Printers > Add Printer > and install the Generic/Text Only. I tend to hook printers to XP and newer machines so I happened to have that Generic / Text Only as the default! Sorry again!

I'm still having no joy with HWinfo.

I'm a bit puzzled when you talk about floppies.

I've been running it in true DOS from the hard drive.

Is that not the way to use it (the documentation is silent as to how to actually deploy the program)?

You mention copying himem.sys to the floppy.

Are you talking about a bootable floppy?

Which config.sys do I modify, the one on the hard drive, in which case why copy himem.sys to a floppy, or a copy of it on a bootable floppy?

Sorry, I'm confused here..........

Yup, that would be the problem. F8 Command Line DOS is actually not true DOS (it has HIMEM, IFSHLP, DOSHIGH, and other stuff I can't remember now). Most low level tools like HwInfo, RAM Testers, Intel Utilities and such require pure bare true DOS since they supply their own memory management in their code. What you need do is FULL format a floppy and check the Copy System Files box if you are using the Win9x GUI (essentially the same as format a: /s from a command line). Then place the HwInfo files on there and boot to the floppy. These are the same instructions you follow for many true DOS utilities.

I tried disabling the USB functions in the BIOS, which you can do (as Den says, the only way to disable the sound hardware is by physically pulling a jumper.)

This didn't bring the sound hardware to life. :no:

(sigh) I had some hope for that one. I believe for this to work you will have to go entirely Medieval on this box: nuke the Windows\INF bins, kill the serial ports, and temporarily disable USB, ethernet, sound. Re-enable one-by-one with USB first. Cross fingers, reboot often and look for a brand new IRQ arrangement in DM.

P.S. Very nice motherboard BTW. And, I see a BIOS setting you have called: USB Device 9, Function 7, with its not so helpful description: This setting controls USB functionality. Options are Disabled and Enabled.. This is a new one on me, least I can't remember seeing it before. Anyone else know what it is?

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i realise I'm very late to join this thread and that it has moved on considerably form the original post about getting a Jessops card reader to work with Win 98 but if it helps I have the card reader you refer to and also the Win 98 driver. It works under Win98FE. I can supply it if you need it.

stuck

(but probably not until Monday as I'm going home now and my home PC is off-line at the moment)

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i realise I'm very late to join this thread and that it has moved on considerably form the original post about getting a Jessops card reader to work with Win 98 but if it helps I have the card reader you refer to and also the Win 98 driver. It works under Win98FE. I can supply it if you need it.

stuck

(but probably not until Monday as I'm going home now and my home PC is off-line at the moment)

Thanks stuck, I appreciate that.

Are you sure that the Jessops card reader you have is the same as the one I'm trying to get working in Windows 98?

The reason I ask is because I also have an older Jessops multi-card reader, which they did supply Windows 98 drivers for. That is a four port box with "Universal Card Reader" on it, and it has to be connected with a separate USB cable.

The new one is a five port box and has "All in One" on it, and the USB connector is built into the box and swivels out.

The difference is that the the older reader won't read SD HC cards, and the new one will.

I'm pretty sure that no manufacturer's driver for Windows 98 exists for the new reader, at least not downloadable from the Jessops site where I downloaded the driver for the older reader.

Cheers, Dave.

Edited by Dave-H
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Hi Dave,

Another thought about your non-functional audio: maybe you can run Driver Cleaner v1.5, remove all vestiges of your audio driver, and then re-install your audio driver.

Good thought Multibooter, but even with the audio drivers uninstalled, the audio hardware still appears in the Device Manager as an unknown device, with the same resource problem, i.e. no IRQ (IRQ 00).

I will give it a try though once I get to the end of all the other avenues I'm currently following!

:)

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Another thought about your non-functional audio: maybe you can run Driver Cleaner v1.5, remove all vestiges of your audio driver, and then re-install your audio driver.

Dave, in case you decide to follow Multibooter's idea, which may in fact help, I've decided to quote myself from elsewhere, just to point you to the right version of it:

Do it using the great freeware Driver Cleaner Pro Version 1.5 (*NOT* the for-pay Driver Cleaner .NET !!!).

However, I'm begining to think that you ought to image your system or even put in a spare HDD in place and do a clean install of 98, using RegShot before and after the audio driver's installation, for us to find out which entries are created in the register and which files are needed and where do they go. It would also require the creation of a full file list before and after the sound drivers installation, so it must be planned carefully beforehand to be effective. This is a really time consuming task, but might be the way to go in case all else fails.

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I hear that! Well if you need it, you need it, but pulling it out and making sure the legacy serial and parallel is turned off in the BIOS usually guarantees that IRQ 3 and 4 is free, ... and in your case, one less device on 11 .... UPDATE: ok i am looking at the Device Manager (DM) listing and see both IRQ3 and IRQ4 are wasted by serial ports. I would suggest they get deleted in DM and then you immediately locate that BIOS setting and disable them so they do not return (note for example : I have USB channels on IRQ 3 and 4 plus separate IRQ Holders) .... UPDATE: looking at the manual dencorso provided, they hid this setting under I/O Device Configuration and a submenu where Serial Port A and B are found.

Tried that, and the COM1 port and the LPT1 parallel printer port were put back by the plug and play system even though they were disabled in the BIOS!

Didn't make any difference to the sound problem.

:no:

Actually this *is* how the BIOS Routing Table changes. You may have noticed when an upgrade is available for a motherboard BIOS it usually adds some features and fixes some bugs. Among the actual changes made when you perform an upgrade are corrections and additions to the Routing Table. The table is located in the programmable BIOS (and in many cases we ourselves can edit the image with BIOS hacking tools and later Flash this modded image back to the Eprom). Anyway, was there a BIOS flashing done before you added the USB reader?

I did update the BIOS version ages ago acting on the the instructions of Supermicro technical support to resolve a problem with Seagate hard drives.

I ran the update again recently just in case it had any bearing on this problem, but it made no difference.

Yours must have spooled to the Default Printer! Sorry about those Print To File instructions, I just assumed everyone had the Generic / Text Only printer driver installed. Do you have it in your Control Panel > Printers? If you do then this is how you get that Device Manager listing into an ASCII text file:

Don't worry! That's exactly how I resolved the problem!

:)

Yup, that would be the problem. F8 Command Line DOS is actually not true DOS (it has HIMEM, IFSHLP, DOSHIGH, and other stuff I can't remember now). Most low level tools like HwInfo, RAM Testers, Intel Utilities and such require pure bare true DOS since they supply their own memory management in their code. What you need do is FULL format a floppy and check the Copy System Files box if you are using the Win9x GUI (essentially the same as format a: /s from a command line). Then place the HwInfo files on there and boot to the floppy. These are the same instructions you follow for many true DOS utilities.

Tried again, but still no joy!

:no:

Created a bootable floppy, copied HWINFO.EXE and HWINFO.DAT to the floppy (I assume they're the only necessary files, any more would have been too big for the disk!)

When I booted to the floppy and ran HWINFO, it just said "Program is too big to fit in memory".

Tried copying himem.sys to the disk, and creating a config.sys on the disk just with "device=a:\himem.sys /testmem:off" in it, and it still threw up the same error message.

:(

(sigh) I had some hope for that one. I believe for this to work you will have to go entirely Medieval on this box: nuke the Windows\INF bins, kill the serial ports, and temporarily disable USB, ethernet, sound. Re-enable one-by-one with USB first. Cross fingers, reboot often and look for a brand new IRQ arrangement in DM.

Yes, well I might try that next!

P.S. Very nice motherboard BTW. And, I see a BIOS setting you have called: USB Device 9, Function 7, with its not so helpful description: This setting controls USB functionality. Options are Disabled and Enabled.. This is a new one on me, least I can't remember seeing it before. Anyone else know what it is?

I'd like to know too!

That option doesn't appear in my BIOS settings.

I have the latest version (1.3b)

:)

Edited by Dave-H
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Another thought about your non-functional audio: maybe you can run Driver Cleaner v1.5, remove all vestiges of your audio driver, and then re-install your audio driver.

Dave, in case you decide to follow Multibooter's idea, which may in fact help, I've decided to quote myself from elsewhere, just to point you to the right version of it:

Do it using the great freeware Driver Cleaner Pro Version 1.5 (*NOT* the for-pay Driver Cleaner .NET !!!).

However, I'm begining to think that you ought to image your system or even put in a spare HDD in place and do a clean install of 98, using RegShot before and after the audio driver's installation, for us to find out which entries are created in the register and which files are needed and where do they go. It would also require the creation of a full file list before and after the sound drivers installation, so it must be planned carefully beforehand to be effective. This is a really time consuming task, but might be the way to go in case all else fails.

Thanks for that Den and Multibooter.

Tried using Driver Cleaner, but it made no difference.

:no:

The only thing I didn't do was actually physically disabling the sound hardware, as that involves taking the machine to bits again.

I will try again when I've got it apart, if it comes to that again!

Swapping drives and installing Windows 98 from scratch are my very last resort.

I really hope that it doesn't come to that!

:)

Edited by Dave-H
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It's gone very quiet.............

:hello:

Anyway, I have news to report!

:yes:

I finally bit the bullet and tried making a completely new install of Windows 98SE.

This was not without its problems, needless to say.

Fortunately I have IDE drives in removable cradles, so that bit was quite easy physically.

I disconnected my system drives (which are SCSI) and booted up using a boot disk.

I then found that Windows wouldn't install on the drive, because of course it wasn't a primary active partition.

D'oh!

Once I'd sorted that out with Fdisk, and then spent ages reformatting the drive, it worked.

It went through the setup process until the last restart, and then said "not enough memory".

Of course what it actually meant was "too much memory"!

I have 4GB of RAM fitted.

Double d'oh!

Fortunately I still had the original two 512MB DIMMs from before I upgraded, so I had to take the machine even more apart, and put them back in, praying that setup would complete with 1GB of RAM.

Fortunately, it did.

I've now told it to limit the memory to 512MB, so hopefully it will still start now without me having to physically swap the memory again.

I then put the Supermicro setup CD in, and installed just the sound drivers (an ancient version, but would prove the point). The sound worked!

:thumbup

I then installed the Intel chipset drivers, which includes the USB hardware (I made sure that no USB devices were actually connected during all this of course.)

They installed fine, and the sound still worked.

I then installed the drivers for the ethernet controller.

That eventually also worked fine after a bit of messing around, and the sound still worked!

So, the only things on the PCI bus without drivers were the modem, my Canopus video capture card, and the USB 2 controller, which has no Windows 98 drivers of course.

I didn't think it was worth installing the first two's drivers, as I think the point had been proved.

At least I now know that this is a configuration problem, there is nothing wrong on the motherboard, which is a relief.

I have a few files to post, if anyone would like to look at them.

This contains the Device Manager "printout" plus a save of the System Information from the working Windows 98.

I also saved the Enum key from the registry of the working system.

Dare I put it into the non-working system?

:ph34r:

Edited by Dave-H
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Hi, Dave!

Way to go, you did what had to be done! :thumbup

I don't undestand, however, why you've used FDISK+FORMAT, when I know you have part240 (=RPM, the Ranish Partition Manager), which would be much faster, because it lets you quick-format, instead of plain formatting. But that part is done already, so there's no use in going at lenght about it, unless it becomes necessary to do it yet again. :ph34r:

And I do think you've already spelt out what comes next!

So let's do it:

Backup your registry.

Backup the key directories (those Multibooter mentioned).

and...

From True DOS with HIMEM.SYS do the following:

Load smartdrv (it's important! makes things go *much* faster).

Use dos regedit to delete the ENUM key from the old system registry.

Use dos regedit to merge the ENUM key from the new system registry.

Cross your fingers and reboot and let windows start.

If it doesn't work you may have to do it for each of CONFIG, ENUM, HARDWARE, and maybe DRIVER!!!

So expend some time really learning how to use the dos regedit.

Start here, here and here.

Arm yourself with lots of patience and good reading!

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Thanks Den!

I will do that thing.

:yes:

Just one quick question.

The links you gave say that the version of regedit.exe that came with Windows 98 is buggy and should be replaced with a "fixed" version.

I actually have the version which came from ME, 4.90.0.3000.

I can't remember exactly where it came from, possibly soporific's Auto-Patcher.

Is that OK to use for this exercise?

BTW, I completely forgot that Partition Manager would have done the necessary formatting for me!

:)

Edited by Dave-H
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I actually have the version which came from ME, 4.90.0.3000.

I can't remember exactly where it came from, possibly soporific's Auto-Patcher.

Is that OK to use for this exercise?

If it runs under 98SE and has the "Favorites" menu, then yes, that's the one and only!
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I'm afraid I didn't have a lot of luck with regedit in DOS.

:no:

It seemed to work OK to delete a key, but I couldn't import the key I wanted to import from the other Windows 98 installation with working sound.

It went through the motions of importing it, with a count from zero up to 100%, but as soon as it got to 100% a message came up saying - "Couldn't import enum.reg: Error accessing the registry."

I made sure that system.dat and user.dat had their read-only and hidden attributes off, but it made no difference.

It certainly deleted the enum key OK, judging by the mess I was greeted with when I rebooted, but it would not import the replacement key that I wanted it to.

Presumably it will import registry data from another Windows 98 installation?

The only thing I could think of that might have made the new data incompatible was that the new installation was installed to the default C:\Windows folder, and my original is in C:\WIN-98.

I can't see any path specific data in that registry key though.

So, I gave up on that, and tried again just removing the enum and config keys and letting everything install again.

I also this time deleted the two .bin files from the INF folder.

After a huge amount of messing around I was back where I was before.

The system absolutely refuses to allocate a working configuration to the sound hardware.

I even un-ticked the "automatic" option on its resources tab, and then found that it was now apparently on IRQ 11.

I had written down the resources being used on the working system, which was also IRQ 11, but some of the Memory Ranges and I/O Ranges were different.

I changed them so the information in the resources tab was absolutely identical to that on the working system, and still the drivers refused to load and no sound!

:no:

All the other hardware can be made to work fine.

I really am puzzled completely by this now.

I think that we're perhaps looking in the wrong place by playing with the registry.

If you remember, I did restore a very old copy of the registry, from long before this problem appeared, and nothing at all changed.

I suspect that the problem isn't being caused by anything in the registry in that case.

We know now that it's not an actual hardware fault, as it works fine with the new installation.

So where does that leave us?

Surely it can only now be a configuration error somewhere that isn't stored in the registry, or a system file problem.

Are there any files associated with NUSB that could conceivably cause this sort of problem?

I think I've got rid of them all now and restored the originals of any that NUSB replaced, but you never know, I could well have missed one or more!

:)

Edited by Dave-H
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Hi, Dave!

Let's go slow...

Her's a new experiment:

Go into regedit, in your old 98 installation and export HKLM\Software to a reg file.

Then go to true DOS and substitute just system.dat by the one you created in the new installation.

Try to go back to 98 now. If the system manages to do it, merge the reg file you just created to it.

Then reboot and test how things went.

BTW, if you just unpack NUSB3.3 to a subdirectory with, say, 7-zip, you'll then have a copy of all the files in NUSB.

So you can make sure you've removed all files it installs, by comparison. But I highly doubt you sound problem stems from NUSB (note that I've been wrong, in my life, so many times that I cannot actually count them, but that's my gut feeling, anyway).

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