why are my cd/dvd drive and audigy sound card suddenly not showing up?

[Cartoon Corpse]

im having to reboot 3-4 times...use the "add hardware" button. then after a while, they return...i have sound....i have a 'D' drive again.

dvd gives (initially) error code 10, after driver reinstall....code 9 (something about the firmware not doing something correctly), but reboot brings it back up after i do all these things.

for audigy problem i click on my downloaded driver install, it says there is no audigy card. then i reboot and it's working again.

do these symptons point to anything? virusy? last night i downloaded about 46 new patches for xp (im a little behind, but i don't get on the web much with this rig)

anyway once the hardware is working it works fine...till i shutdown (restart isn't a problem). same thing when i power up from 'off' condition.

do i need a 'fresh' install of xp? (only 3-4 months old)

 

[digitalwanderer]

When did it start doing this?

 

[Cartoon Corpse]

When did it start doing this?

couple of weeks ago...first cd/dvd then soundcard as well. when i got back from Ca (training) the soundcard started doing this. almost thought someone had broken in and stolen it!

i swapped out my cd/dvd (original) for my old one from my last pc (thinking i got a lemon dvd), but now it's doing it with this one too.

 

[hoom]

I had something like that, turned out that the WLAN card had half popped out of the PCI slot, popped it back in & the problems disappeared.
Possibly try re-seating your cards etc to make sure all the connections are ok?

 

[Cartoon Corpse]

could be it, since i installed them. lol.

i found some wacko stuff in my msconfig. startup. turned it off, conditional reboots now, but it works at least.

BEWARE winter wonderland whatzit! some sort of background/screensaver switcher. i can't for the life of me figure how it got installed. and over in "all programs" directory (cleverly disguised) there is NO uninstall. AND it doesn't appear in my install/uninstall programs window!

dagnabbit.

also noticed something called soundman? is that a standard piece of equipment? i turned it off too.

as far as the sound card issue, the pc kept trying to start an nvidia driver, and my audigy equipment wasn't even listed!

anyway somehow between winter whatzit and soundman, my cd/dvd and soundcard weren't even noticed as being installed. (plug and play didn't even detect them!)

anyone have similar issues in the past?

 

[chavvdarrr]

soundman is usually the name of sound mixer for Realtek on-board chips ...

 

[digitalwanderer]

i found some wacko stuff in my msconfig. startup. turned it off, conditional reboots now, but it works at least.

I'm confused, what are "conditional reboots"?

 

[zsouthboy]

Does your board have an nforce4 chip, by any chance?

 

[Cartoon Corpse]

I'm confused, what are "conditional reboots"?

in msconfig. you can select the standard boot, or conditional boot (options on various services)

on my rig (at least) even if you select standard boot, yet go to one of the other tabs (eg startup, or services) and deselect one or more (eg remote desktop), my normal/conditional boot page changes to conditional boot automatically.

anyway, i sure don't want need all the services. and as of now, not all the startup entries as well. (got rid of soundman and that winter whatzit thing)

 

[Cartoon Corpse]

Does your board have an nforce4 chip, by any chance?

not sure. does that mean nvidia chipset board? if so, then yes. it's an asus 8n 32 deluxe SLI (or something like that) (even though i run an ATI x1900xtx GPU.

though i may try that new 1 slot SLI Nvidia card in the near term. if i can get it as a dx10 ready version when vista comes out.

 

[zsouthboy]

It sounds stupid, but reinstall forceware drivers and do NOT install the SW IDE drivers.