Well, I finally got most of my original computer issues resolved. I didn't have time to try fixing anything until this week due to some math project, but a new hard disk seems to have done the trick. However, there are still two problems that I cannot seem to resolve and would appreciate any suggestions you have.
The first thing is that the computer does not fully read the new drive. It is a 160GB maxtor HDD that has been split into two 80GB FAT32 partitions and connected through a PCI ATA/133 controller card so that WinME will read it properly. The first partition is properly detected, but the second one only registers as a 57GB section (this is with 1MB being 2
20=1048576 bytes). Interestingly, when the ATA controller is detecting the drives at startup, it registers as a 152GB drive (and the 8GB difference is probably due to the different megabyte definitions), so it appears to be some problem with windows rather than defective hardware. This is not an immediate issue since I won't be using up the space anytime soon, but at the same time it's a bit annoying to be losing 23GB for nothing.
The other and more pressing problem is that I cannot get the SBLive's SB16 emulation to work. The SB16 emulation entry in the windows device manager says that it is "working properly," but no programs are able to autodetect it and the port settings given in the device manager don't work, so there is no sound in any older DOS games. The SET BLASTER line is in the startup environment variable listing with the appropriate settings and there are no IRQ conflicts related to this. The settings are the fairly standard port 220, IRQ 5, DMA 1/5 combination. I tried running the games in native dos mode with a boot disk and the dos soundard drivers, but that didn't do anything different. The SBLive manual says that the analog port on the soundcard needs to be connected to the CD drive for the dos games to work (although I have no idea why this would have anything to do with it), so I tried using a different (identical) cable for this in case my existing one was defective, connecting it to the other CD drive (I have two drives) and some other such things, but nothing seems to work. It was working fine on my old setup though, which was identical except for the motherboard and hard drive. Any ideas as to what could be causing this?
By the way, the device manager seems to show multiple entries for some hardware. For example, "NVIDIA nForce2 Memory Controller" appears five times in the list. If I delete any of them, windows detects "new hardware" on the next startup and creates the extra driver entries again.
This is not really causing any problems but I was just wondering if it is normal.
Once I get everything here working properly I will probably be looking into upgrading several of the major components in this machine as well, as it's getting rather outdated. Is that new Radeon 9800 XT model any good? It is a lot more expensive than the 9800 pro 256 but I don't know what the difference in performance is.
