Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 08:44:47 From: "neil barnes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [LIB] L50 w/damaged sound chip or fuse on MB?
>Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 02:03:19 +0000 >From: "Matthew Hanson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: L50 w/damaged sound chip or fuse on MB? > >I can no longer run my sound driver in the L50. The only thing I can think >of that caused this problem would be trying to set up the HP M820E CD-R/RW >drive�s SCSI card on the L50 w/P75 CPU. The CPU requirement for the HP >drive is a P133. At the same time, I set up the WavJammer SCSI sound card >on the EPR�s PC card slot. Is it possible that setting up these two SCSI >cards simultaneously, one that wasn�t rated for this system, could have >caused the SCSI card to overheat, and thus damage the Yamaha OPL3-Sax chip >on the MB? > >Let me preface the rest of this by saying that my L50 is stock, not >overclocked, and the HDD spacers have not been removed. Here�s the rest of >the story: > >The other night I installed the drivers for this HP CD-R/RW drive, and for >the WavJammer sound card, onto a 6.4GB HDD in my L50. I had to Is your 6.4G drive 8.5mm? >disable the >onboard Yamaha driver to get the WavJammer drivers working, but all went >well at that point. The CD-R/RW drive actually played music CDs fine via >its line-out plug. > >Everything worked fine until I finished running some audio recording tests, >removed the HP and WavJammer drivers, and rebooted. When the desktop >appeared as a solid color, the mouse pointer froze along with the system. >After trying a few things, I ended up disabling the sound driver in Safe >Mode. That got the system to do a full boot where the system worked fine. > >The next night I put my old 750MB HDD into the L50 to back up files and >prepare for a Mandrake installation. I could swear that the system booted >with the sound driver enabled with no problem. Not remembering the system >needed a P133 at this point, I went ahead and installed the drivers for the >CD-R/RW drive onto this HDD too. > >But the system did not like trying to load and run Nero, and suddenly I >realized why (not enough CPU power), as the system froze in the process. I >booted into Safe Mode, uninstalled Nero and the CD-R/RW drivers, and >rebooted. But it turned out that the system froze at the same point >booting >into the desktop as it did with the 6.4GB HD the night before. Went back >into Safe Mode, disabled the sound driver, and all was well. > >But I was wondering, was this an OS problem that I somehow caused on two >HDDS? Or is this a hardware problem related to the sound chip on the MB? > >So I copied the Win98 installation files to the HDD, booted into DOS, ran >attrib and deltree to delete everything else, and installed Win98 onto the >750MB HDD. But when Windows finishing setting up and booted into the >desktop, everything froze. Disabling the sound driver in Safe Mode fixed >the problem again. > >Okay� I wanted to have Win95 on that drive to experiment with installing >Mandrake from a CD-ROM. So I repeated the process and installed Win95. >Same problem. Froze booting the desktop. Disabling sound in Safe Mode got >the system to fully boot and run. > >So here was the last test. I deleted the L50 sound driver, put the 750MB >HDD into my L70, and when Windows asked for the sound driver, I fed it the >L70 sound driver via FDD� and TAH DA!� the �Microsoft Sound.Wav� chimed out >fine. No sound problems with the HDD on the L70. > >Now the only thing I noticed when the problem first manifested, was that >the >bottom of the L50 seemed fire hot when I pulled out the CD-R/RW and >WavJammer SCSI cards. Again, I wonder if those cards could have caused the >sound chip to overheat. > >Or could there be another magic fuse fix here Neil? > >All input will be greatly appreciated� though I fear the worst. > >Thanks, > >Matt <nothing snipped for context> <except the footers and header> Um...I don't have much of an idea here. A control card that requires more CPU power should just run slowly - it needs it to get data on and off the pcmcia card, because there is no DMA route (IIRC). Overheating cards is a possibility, though i've never seen it affect just the sound. However, sudden lockups talking to pc cards were a symptom of my last 50 overheating - though in that case it was a modem card. There isn't a fuse AFAIK that just deals with the sound card - can't see why they'd want one, really. One thought is that the interrupts and DMAs from the sound card have got severely screwed - you could check them in the bios - possibly something colliding with the other two cards? Last thing - the sound chip has several modes of operation: an eight bit only soundblaster emulation, a sixteen bit yamaha mode, and a sixteen bit windows sound system mode. The windows sound is only eight bits mono...could be it's only working in that mode for whatever reason. Neil _________________________________________________________________ Join the world�s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com ************************************************************** http://libretto.basiclink.com - Libretto mailing list http://libretto.basiclink.com/archive - Archives http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/portable/faq.html - FAQ -------TO UNSUBSCRIBE------- Reply to any of the list messages. 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