Soundblaster 16 ISA sound card problem...please help.

[Flavius]

Put together a cheapie system for my sister to use and was going to bring it up to her this weekend. Of course, now I've encountered a hiccup, and cannot seem to find my way around it. This card came from an old backup system of mine, and although it's been sitting dormant for several months...I'm fairly certain it's still functioning (can't imagine what would have caused it to crap out in the meantime).

The motherboard is an ABIT BX6 r2.0. The only hardware I changed before installing a new OS (Windows XP Professional) was moving from a Celeron 300 to a PIII 500 cpu. I installed xp...didn't really mess with bios settings at all except for identifying the proper cpu as it didn't auto detect, and didn't seem to have a problem. I did notice afterwards that I didn't adjust the bios to reflect that a PnP OS was installed...not sure if that'd cause the problem or not. But...the card isn't showing up under system hardware at all...only see codecs and drivers in device manager.

Any help anyone can offer would be greatly appreciated...I'm supposed to be heading out with this thing Friday afternoon (and she knows it's coming, so I'd hate to disappoint her).

 

[jackschmittusa]

ISA card may not be PnP. May have to manually list required resources in config.sys file for Winxp to find it. May even be jumpers on the card for resource settings.

 

[Calin]

Try to add hardware, Creative Sound Blaster compatible.
It is a Creative card? Then you could find some drivers for it. But if it is something else, and the Creative compatibility is obtained thru a special driver, you're out of luck. But with no details (as to what chips are on the sound card. manufacturer and so on, little help is possible)

Calin

 

[VirtualLarry]

That seems somewhat odd. Perhaps this is one of those cases where XP actually dropped support for particular (older) hardware, even though it was common? (XP doesn't support the very-common NE2000-compatible ethernet card either.)

Ah!

You did mention the BIOS setting for PnP OS - try setting that to "YES" or "ON".

If you do that, then the BIOS, when booting, will assign resources to the ISA PnP cards, and it should display the IRQ assigned during the POST banner screen too.

If XP still doesn't detect it, even then, then you might have to try installing the W2K drivers for that card under XP, they should be compatible.

This all assumes that it is a "true blue" SoundBlaster(tm) card. If it's some 3rd-party clone then who knows, you might need to find specific drivers for it.

You could also try to manually install it, as a non-PnP card, under XP, try using some sort of "SB Pro Compatible" driver if one exists.

 

[LiLithTecH]

If it is a CT2900 series (circa 1995-96), then it is not PnP.
You need to set the jumpers for the IRQ/DMA settings.

Just check in the DEVICE MANAGER to see what IRQ and DMA channels
are open (Device Manager \ View \ Resources by connection) and
set those on the card's jumpers.

WinXP really doesn't care what the BIOS is set to, it normally will override
the BIOS settings.

 

[redbeard1]

I've had a couple of those old creative cards that were listed in the XP device manager as though they were windows generic devices not hinting that they were sound blasters. Does the sound work at all?

 

[biostud]

Also try moving the card to another slot.

 

[PingSpike]

Originally posted by: biostud666
Also try moving the card to another slot.

Thats assuming he's lucky enough to have a board that has more than 1 ISA slot.

We need to know exactly what kind of card it is.

I remember the days of None-PnP device configuration. And I don't remember them fondly.