No sound, Win2K & nF2
I just installed Win2K on my secondary PC. It's got an Asus A7N8X-X motherboard. For some reason I can't get any sound out of this thing. There is no device driver conflict, all of the outputs are non-muted, and the driver I'm using is the latest one from nVidia.
What could I be doing wrong? I gotta get this thing running by noon tomorrow to bring to the LAN!
What could I be doing wrong? I gotta get this thing running by noon tomorrow to bring to the LAN!
0
Comments
In this case, I would say look on nVidia's site for info that specifies service packs the driver is compatible with for 2000. 2000 had problems with some sound devices as released on CD. The other thing to note is that if you have an IRQ or DMA conflict going, sound signals can get routed to the wrong device, so the question then becomes, is anything else working semi-brokenly??? Like a network card??? Commonest conflict is a NIC is using same resources (IRQ AND\OR DMA CHANNEL), next most common that I can think of is a USB device or root hub or a three-device-same-IRQ stack-- this is particularly true when running 2000.
Second, see if there are DOS level drivers for your nf2 embedded sound thing, 2000 can work better for sound device detection if the DOS drivers are present at detect time. This chipset will run better for media stuff, including sound, with XP, but that is something you might not be able to do, while service packs at nVidia you can check. You may NOT want the latest drivers for 2000 particlularly, also-- for XP yes, for 2000 maybe not.
For your purposes of use, can you use a PCI sound card in an emergency, and disable the onboard sound?? That might prove to be the FASTEST fix, though it is a compromise. With sound working, you might be able to at least use box until someone can help AT the LAN.
Well, base problem is that 2000 is not media optimized, it is network optimized.
Fix would have to be in BIOS, and BIOS PNP mostly is tuned to PCI IRQ stacks. Something to try, have the BIOS reallocate resources, and that should be top option in PNP, not in those words, but it should have a top option that forces this. I can't tell you for your box which service pack level exactly will fix, but SP4 level is more compatible with XP tuned devices and chipsets than SP1 or pre-SP1. SP3 is also better than SP1 for media things.
BIOSs have three-to-four strategy options for this, typically, and way to do this is to set top option to yes or enabled, restart machine (BIOS will do this for you once you save settings), go into Windows (should come up after the auto-reboot from BIOS), see what is broken, if all you need works, leave it be, if not go back and restart, go into BIOS, set same option to enabled or yes, repeat, up to four times.
Reason for resetting this option each time is that it is a one-time switch.
QUICK try is to see if BIOS can reset resources itself in a way that breaks least amount of things.
Possibly after multiple passes-- not just one pass, often. AFAIK, the nf2 chipset needs a non-intermittent sound to work right. Trick is to give sound greater priority in order to get it working. An ESCD reset with ACPI enabled should help this, but what works afterwards depends on BIOS details I do not know. What doing this forces, is to make BIOS look at device resource option tables, try different combos. I have also seen a legacy LPT1 port conflict with sound. So, if sound wants IRQ 7 or 5 per device manager, one thing possible to try is to disable the printer port in BIOS, then reset ESCD, then save settign in BIOS.
2000 SP4 will try to sync new ESCD to its settings after each change, yes. Expect a longer then normal boot time, it will not visually tell you it is doing this. What you are doing is essentially reprioritizing devices as well as assigning new resources to them.
One thing I forgot to mention: I've disabled all the functions in BIOS that I don't use on my PC, things like the floppy controller and parallel port are disabled already.
Thanks for all the advice, John!