Hi all,
I have a musician friend who's not too familiar with PCs. I'm a computer buff, but am pretty clueless about PT. Together, we are attempting to get PT LE 6.1.1 (with an MBox 1) installed onto his recently rebuilt PC. So far, it's been a bit of a bust, and I was hoping someone could give me a quick checklist of what steps I should take, and in which order. Pretty please.
(I apologize for making my first post a plea for help. If this were
my system that I was configuring, I would have already read this forum for weeks, made notes, checklists, etc. I wouldn't be so clueless now. But, it's not my system, and I'm not looking for a new hobby, so I'm begging you to help me short-cut the debugging process a bit. I know this is annoying to all you old hands that did this the correct, honest, and hard way. I empathize. Thank you again.)
Okay. My buddy received an MBox 1 package back in 2004-ish. Back then I helped him build a PC for it, but he did the PT install himself. It took him about 3 months to get it to (mostly) stop crashing, as I recall. I was able to find that "DEP fix" for him, and that seemed to let him run it okay. Flash forward to today: I've built him a new mo' better box. Reinstalled XP Home. Did all the Windows Updates, which include SP3 and (eek!) IE 8. (Which I
now understand is the mortal enemy of PT. I can remove it if you advise me too.)
The new box is a 3GHz Core 2 Duo on an EVGA mobo. NVIDIA nForce 730i northbridge. Onboard GeForce 9300 video. 4GB memory, of which 2.75GB is usable. 640GB SATA drive, onto which we are installing everything. There's also a 200GB IDE drive connected, which contains his old Windows and PT install. (He'll be moving his files and projects over, and then reformatting that drive.)
Here's what happened during our failed attempt at installing/running PT last night:
The disc he has is labeled: PT LE 6.1.1. It came with the MBox. I went and downloaded the "Pro Tools LE 6.1 to 6.4 Update" from the Digi website. I also downloaded the "InterLok drivers installer v5.8.10.3223" from the PACE site. I did
not download anything like the "Pro Tools LE 6.4cs9" update, because it looked like that only applied to "Digi 002" (whatever that is) users. This may have been a fatal error. Not sure.
First, I installed PT 6.1.1 off the disc. No obvious probs. Then I installed the 6.4 update. Then I installed the PACE InterLok driver update. Then I tried to run PT for the first time. It complained about the lack of hardware. Ah, duh! Plugged in the MBox. The "Found New Hardware" notifications popped up. I told it to load the drivers, but it couldn't find them. Twice. I have no idea where the various driver installers were storing the files, so I wasn't able to point the hardware wizard at them explicitly. It was at some point in here where we were asked to restart the PC again.
Bam. Blue screen. Auto restart. Over and over. Can't even get into Windows now. Safe mode. Didn't help. Unplugged MBox. Didn't help. Chose the "Last known good settings" option on the boot screen. Yay! We're back in.
Went into the Hardware Wizard and uninstalled all the driverless Digi devices listed there. Poked around on the Digi site again, looking for some hardware drivers that XP would actually use/recognize. Found some "Version 7" drivers. Installed those. Windows actually recognized them and showed a device as being installed. But the found-new-hardware wizard still failed twice more, again complaining about un-findable drivers.
Tried to run PT again. Now, it's complaining about a missing .dll. DAE.dll, maybe? I don't remember. The .dll
did exist, however. I assume that it was the wrong version, and that perhaps that "Version 7" driver update is incompatible with PT 6.4. Or something.
IE8 is currently installed. I can try nuking it if you think that might help. I checked out the DEP settings, and they are set the way Digi recommends. "Windows only programs", or something like that. I can try the more drastic "DEP fix" found
here, if anyone thinks that will help.
So that's it. I'm really hoping one of you can tell me the correct sequence of things to do and install, so this will work. Thanks in advance.
PS. If the path of least resistance is to upgrade PT or ditch the MBox, let me know that too. My buddy doesn't want to spend any more money, but I'm willing to twist his arm a bit, just to protect my sanity!