Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 02:03:19 +
From: Matthew Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: L50 w/damaged sound chip or fuse on MB?
Neal, Raymond, and the rest of you great technical wizards. I really need
your help tracking down the source of this problem, and seeing if there's
any hope for fixing it.
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
drives 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 EPRs PC card slot. Is it possible that setting up these two SCSI
cards simultaneously, one that wasnt 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. Heres 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 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
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