| Author |
Message |
olliehay
| | Posted on Thursday, June 15, 2000 - 6:31 pm: | |
Hi there:
A friend of mine has a PB 660cd with 40 mb RAM, 1.3 gig free hard drive space. He's varied the configuration of the computer by adding a SB16 sound card, and a 56K modem. He also installed the Win 98 upgrade over Win 95.
Sometime in the midst of adding the new hardware and installing the windows upgrade, his floppy drive stopped working. It still shows up in the Device Manager, as working fine, but any attempts to use it completely freeze up his machine. In an offhanded remark, he mentioned he was having problems with his sound card. We took the sound card out and the floppy drive worked, so it's obvious that the two are conflicting.
My question is this: we've tried to change the IRQs for the sound card, but the way PB sets it up we have limited access to the CMOS or BIOS setup. I would like to format the hard drive and then install Win 98 only on the system. I think that this would allow us to access the IRQ and BIOS and so on. Do you think that it would work? Has anyone else had this problem? He doesn't have any free slots to physically move the sound card, so it's the only solution I can think of. The thing is I'm reluctant to make him go through that much if there's not much chance of success.
Thanks. |
GerryH
| | Posted on Friday, October 27, 2000 - 1:42 pm: | |
Ollie,
Access to BIOS settings is controlled within The CMOS chip. Sorry, re-installing windows will not make access easier. But, Fdisk'ing and a fresh format job will probably make the whole system execute a lot smoother.
Older Pac~bells all used Phoenix BIOS. Not quite sure what "limited access" means? If it is a pre- PCI, or is not a P-n-P certified (BIOS)motherboard, then IRQ's aren't intended to be managed from within BIOS. The SB16 I am fairly sure is an 8 bit ISA card. If an older ISA, IRQ,s will be set by jumpers on the board - If a newer ISA they are probably selected through a utility application within the sound blaster software.
Can't remember their name or URL but in the back (small Ad) section of "Computer Shopper" mag. there has been an ad for years by (the principal)US resource (and archive) for all major brands of Bios, information, numbers, chips -- and many upgrades are availably. |
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