VOGONS


First post, by xjas

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So I'm trying to get my Turtle Beach Montego II going on my K6 machine. This started on a brand new install of Win98SE; no previous sound drivers. Originally I thought the card was a Montego A3D (Montego 1) and installed the driver package in the post I linked to. In my defense, the card looks exactly the goddamn same and the part number on the chip only differs by ONE digit. Naturally that didn't work.

I uninstalled that, and tried to install from the CD ISO on VogonsDrivers. That didn't work either; I got a blue screen every time it got to installing the DOS SBPro emulation device. After this it refused to boot, leaving me hung at a blinking cursor when the system processed the autoexec.bat. I could still boot in safe mode.

I kept messing around with it (doing things like REMing out the TSRs it puts in the autoexec.bat & manually removing things from the device manager), but nothing I did would fix this or get any sound from the card in Windows.

Eventually I figured out that since my card came from a Dell XPS, there was a specific Dell driver release for this card. I don't think it's any different from the normal drivers (unlike Dell's gimped/altered Creative cards), but I tried to uninstall everything and install that. Same result.

The problem is, it's so messed up now with old driver residue, that whenever I boot with the card in, Windows will immediately re-install the old, broken driver package with no way for me to stop it or cancel out, despite the fact that I've expunged every trace of it that I can find from the filesystem. It always BSODs when trying to install the SBPro emulation and always fails to boot in the same way after that. I have no idea where it's dredging the install files up from.

How the heck can I fix this? I'd like to try the Dell package on its own without the residue from the two other failed installs, but I can't even attempt it because Windows always screws itself over before I can run the new installer. I'm pretty sure the card itself works, it seems fine in a Linux machine, but it MAY have some problem that isn't immediately apparent.

Ideas/advice appreciated!

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Reply 1 of 6, by clueless1

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Sounds like a good time for a clean install. Take an image of the HDD after the clean install so you can back to a known good state if it happens again. Extra work upfront, but handy for when stuff like this happens. If you have files you don't want to lose, stick the HDD in another PC and grab them first. This is one of the reasons I'm not fond of Win9x. I've had much better luck with WinME as a retro OS (I only run DOS games on a dedicated DOS PC).

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Reply 2 of 6, by xjas

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Argh, that's what I was trying to avoid doing. 😜 I definitely should have imaged the drive first, but I didn't think the sound card drivers would be the ones to screw things up. Oh well. Annoyingly, it works 100% perfectly with any other sound card installed, but I want my A3D.

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Reply 4 of 6, by xjas

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^^ yeah, it boots in safe mode & doesn't install anything, but if I leave the card in for a normal boot, it hoses itself. Is there a way to wipe the "driver cache" of the found new hardware wizard thing?

BTW tested the Montego II in Linux again and it came up fine & plays sound as you'd expect.

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Reply 5 of 6, by Mister Xiado

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Should be able to, though I can't quite recall where Win9X keeps drivers cached. It won't really break the system if purged/hidden from Windows by renaming it, but that requires a bit more research. All of my time is currently devoted to studying 6502 ASM code, and researching the decompiling of Win16 executables.

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Reply 6 of 6, by Malvineous

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Didn't it copy all that stuff into C:\Windows\inf? If you look in there for recently created files you might be able to find the .inf for the driver and then delete it. The actual driver files will be left behind, but without the .inf files Windows will no longer know about them and won't be able to install anything automatically.

They're just text files so you can double-click on them to open them in Notepad and see what they are for if you're not sure.