Sound card killed 2 systems :\

[Maverick2002]

So yesterday I finished imaging a few resealed XP64 machines. I installed a Creative Labs (?) X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity card in each. Upon login, Windows detected the new card, found drivers for it from Microsoft's website, and proceeded to install said drivers. Sometime near the end of this the computer reset. No BSOD, no nothing. This happened on 2 identical machines around the same time. Now neither will get past the BIOS logo screen. I hope something didn't physically go wrong. Any ideas? Currently I'm re-imaging both drives in hopes that nothing actually got fried. Total BS. How can a driver completely screw a system like that?

 

[nerp]

Because it's a Creative product.

 

[Slugbait]

Because it's a Creative product.

More precisely, because it's a 64-bit version of XP. A lot of hardware manufacturers either didn't write drivers for it, or stopped writing drivers for it.

The drivers available at Windows Update are usually WHQL drivers. You may have better luck using newer drivers instead.

Another option is to not allow the install wiz to check the web, and use the provided system drivers instead.

 

[AnitaPeterson]

Because it's a Creative product.

Oh, you gotta try better than that.

...many people seem to hate Creative for gobbling smaller soundcard companies, but they were top dog for a while, and their PMPs still have the best sound on the market.

I never had a problem with their soundcards myself, and I've had at least 6 of them throughout the last ten years, starting with a SBLive! Value and moving up to two X-Fis currently...

Maverick, you're pointing out to a rather nasty problem. Please come back and let us know if re-imagining the drives has worked, and the computers are functional again. This looks like a hardware issue... but I can't imagine how and why the machines would become physically damaged from having the actual soundcard inserted in them, unless some short-circuit in board causes a cascade effect in the PCI bus, which then propagates to the rest of the motherboard.

 

[RebateMonger]

You could get a good idea of how the hardware is by booting it to a Linux Live CD. You may want to pull the SB card.

 

[Maverick2002]

I ended up pulling the cards are re-imaging the systems. Not too much work since I just needed to reseal them, but it did take a decent chunk of time.

The systems are working fine now, but I think the sound cards really screwed up the OS, possibly even the boot sector (though I'm not sure how that happened).

It was very bizarre ... I've never had a driver reset a computer without any BSOD or anything and then not even attempt to boot Windows.