VOGONS


First post, by athlon-power

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I decided to throw together a second Pentium III rig, using a Biostar M6TWL motherboard that came with a computer I got from a local(ish) auction house back in February 2018. It's using a 600MHz PIII Coppermine, 128MB RAM, and currently, a 3COM Ethernet card in the first PCI slot, and a Cirrus Logic Crystal 4281 PCI sound card in the second slot. No other devices are attached to the system, unless you count the integrated graphics, the Intel 810e chipset. It's running Windows 98 SE.

Immediately, I found that most drivers for the integrated AC '97 Audio refused to work, I tried three separate drivers to no avail. I finally found some off of Intel's website that worked, but when I tried to run DOOM (old DOS version) everything went to Hell in a handbasket, because the system hard froze as soon as I tried to quit DOOM, and that's where the problems really began.

It would BSOD at every normal startup, except Safe Mode. So, I tried enabling BOOTLOG.TXT to see what was going on, because I assumed it was corrupted drivers, but apparently the BSOD kicked in before the system could save the file, and so I could not get a BOOTLOG.TXT out of it.

I went into Safe Mode, uninstalled the video drivers, and I still got a BSOD on startup, so then I went into Safe Mode again, uninstalled the audio drivers, and it booted normally just fine. So, I tried twice to re-install the audio drivers, and both times it hard-crashed right in the middle of setup, it did this in both Safe Mode and normal mode. So, I went into the BIOS,disabled the AC'97 modem option, and in Safe Mode it installed the drivers just fine. SiSoft Sandra kept crashing when I tried to use it with the audio drivers installed, though, and BSOD'd at one point. I had enough, and so I disabled the integrated RealTek Audio in the BIOS, and stuck in my Crystal 4281 PCI sound card.

That didn't work, either. When I tried to use drivers that I had never had issues on, on any other system, it opened the .inf file but showed zero products on the 'select your device from the list' menu. So, I went online, and got another set of drivers that had an installer to it, which didn't seem to do anything as when Windows restarted after the installer requested a restart, it didn't have the drivers in queue. So, I manually set Windows to look in the directory, it found the .inf file, and showed the card on the menu that had been previously blank. But it just said "Windows has not installed the driver for this device", and shortly after, the system hung.

What the Hell is up with this thing and not liking sound cards? I thought the integrated AC'97 Audio was buggered, but even external sound cards seem to fail to run on this machine. I don't really have any other sound cards to test, and I'm honestly just confused. I even checked the jumpers on the motherboard itself to see if everything lines up and was configured correctly, and it was. I have zero idea as to why it hangs constantly when trying to use apparently any sound devices.

Where am I?