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General discussion

Soundblaster Live! MP3 + 5.1 sound card - can't install

Nov 12, 2004 12:30PM PST

Hi,

My system was working perfectly, sound worked great. Then, I was going thru the menu's in musicmatchjb, and I tried to go into player setup, and mmjb crashed. Then, when I restarted it, I found that it would not play. It gave a message like: mmjb failure: soundcard problem, or something like that.

I looked in device manager, and it said my sb was working, but still I had no sound. So, I deleted the sb from the device manager, and proceeded to restart so the card would be recognized again. A card was recoginzed, but it said "PCI multimedia device", no SBLive ... Then, it asked for a driver which I couldn't find, but would not accept any driver on the creative sblive install disk.

Next, I removed everything from the computer that I thought had to do with the sb. First, I did add/remove programs and removed SBLive, and all software. I removed the wave device that was added to device manager. No sound card was listed. I went thru and manually removed everything in the registry that had the words creative, or cddb, or anything else I thought might be related.

Now I try to restart again. Same thing! I can't install this card, yet I know it works. When I got close at one point to getting it to at least install something, I would get a "ctstub" error. I really need help. I use the pc mainly for music anymore, and without sound, this thing is a boat anchor.

The manual says that when the dialog comes up for selecting a driver location, to cancel and insert the install disk and go thru the process. Sometimes that goes thru, but while still in that program, the found new device (PCI multimedia device) comes up again. I click cancel, and the install finishes, but no sound card is ever installed.

PLEASE HELP

I have win98 installed if that helps.

I know I have been long winded, but I wanted to give as much info as I could so someone out there can understand the problem and hopefully help.

TIA,

Viper

Discussion is locked

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Re: Soundblaster Live! MP3 + 5.1 sound card - can't install
Nov 13, 2004 4:11AM PST

did you try re-seating the card in its slot? --fj

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Re: Soundblaster Live! MP3 + 5.1 sound card - can't install
Nov 13, 2004 4:33AM PST

The card is firmly seated in the socket. This seems like a windows system/driver problem to me.

I removed the software and device from device manager, and reinstalled windows. Windows did not correctly pick up the card when reinstalled.

Then, with the new windows installation, I removed all sb software and devices again. Then, rebooted. This time, it did recognize the card. It recognized two things actually. 1. sblive 5.1 wave sound device and 2. pci multimedia audio device. The only one it asked for the driver for was the pci, and I said cancel. Then I used the sb disk to run it's installation. Seemed to go well, but when finished and restarted, I got the new hw found: pci mult audio device again. I clicked cancel again. Then went to device manager. The soundblaster card was NOT listed.

What else can be done to get this card to install. Where else can I get help?

TIA,

Viper