PT Won't boot up due to FW Driver

[DonaldM]

This is a new one. For years now, my main MIDI controller has been my Yamaha Motif XS8 connected via FireWire to my PC. It all works fine. I've kept my Yamaha-Steinberg FW driver up to date over the years. Today, for no reason I can fathom, when I boot up Pro Tools, it goes through the usual initial boot up steps, scans for the plug ins etc, then a window pops up really quickly telling me it wants to install the Yamaha-Stienberg FW driver (something I've NEVER seen it do before ever!) and then come up pop-up window saying "Preparing to install"...and then it just sits there forever.

THe thing is the FW driver is installed and working. I can look at the screen for it separately and its there and recognized by the PC BEFORE I boot up PT.

I tried booting up Reason 9.5 and had the same damn thing happen.

I have no idea what is causing this. I've never seen it before in over 8 years of using PT with my Motif with FW.

I uninstalled and reinstalled the FW driver. Same thing. Rebooted at least 3 times. Same thing. I have no idea what to look at.

Win-10 64bit system. PT 12.8

Thanks

[mjslakeridge]

Do you have any other devices you could plug into the Firewire port to rule out the Firewire card as the problem? The fact that the problem is not limited to ProTools might indicate a hardware issue.

[DonaldM]

Originally Posted by mjslakeridge

Do you have any other devices you could plug into the Firewire port to rule out the Firewire card as the problem? The fact that the problem is not limited to ProTools might indicate a hardware issue.

Well, I thought of that, too. So I unhooked the FW, and uninstalled the driver. And then plugged in the USB with the USB driver...same thing. Now its hung up on trying to install the Yamaha-Steinberg USB Driver...even though its already installed and, as far as I can tell, working. The PC Recognizes it any way.

Same thing with both PT and Reason for both FW and USB. Its just bizzare and I have no explanation for it. My FW driver is the latest version 1.6.6...which hasn't been updated by Y-S since early 2017 I believe. Same for the USB driver. I've kept those up to date.

Its like neither Reason nor PT wants to recognize the Y-S driver all of a sudden. I just don't know where to go from here. There's no way to bypass the screen to just get either PT or Reason to just boot up so I can check the settings in them. I can't figure it.

[DonaldM]

I tried using my Motif XS editor via the FW and it worked just fine. If the FW card were the issue, then the editor would not be talking to the Motif via the FW connection.

Could there be something amiss with the windows installer program? That's the window its stuck on. It says "Preparing to Install" and then just sits there with the blue wheel of death spinning in it. How would I check that?

I'm completely at a loss on this one.

[mjslakeridge]

Well that's good that the Firewire card is OK. It sounds like a process is trying to install a driver over the driver you have already installed. I am way out of my element here, but I would look through all of the processes and services in Windows Task Manager and look for something that might be a device driver installer. If you see processes or services that you have no idea what they do, you can generally Google them and get a general idea of what they are.

[64GTOBOY]

It sounds like something maybe got corrupted during an update or a shutdown. Maybe even some sort of registry thing. Though I have had completely unrelated programs cause faults with midi through USB. Perhaps you can do a recovery to slightly before the issue started. Or maybe someone else has a less drastic option

[DonaldM]

Originally Posted by 64GTOBOY

It sounds like something maybe got corrupted during an update or a shutdown. Maybe even some sort of registry thing. Though I have had completely unrelated programs cause faults with midi through USB. Perhaps you can do a recovery to slightly before the issue started. Or maybe someone else has a less drastic option

Yeah, I'll keep that as the last ditch. But thank you for the idea.

[DonaldM]

Originally Posted by mjslakeridge

Well that's good that the Firewire card is OK. It sounds like a process is trying to install a driver over the driver you have already installed. I am way out of my element here, but I would look through all of the processes and services in Windows Task Manager and look for something that might be a device driver installer. If you see processes or services that you have no idea what they do, you can generally Google them and get a general idea of what they are.

The thing is, Win 10 does all the automatic updates and you never know exactly what its changing. I've just never seen any program try to install a driver during boot up like this...especially a driver that's already installed and working. Makes no sense at all. I'm trying to see if others have had Win 10 "Preparing to Install" hang ups. So far, all I've seen are those that had the problem during installation of Windows updates...not while trying to boot up some other program. I'll keep checking though.

First though...I need to swear, scream and throw a fit...

[albee1952]

Originally Posted by 64GTOBOY

It sounds like something maybe got corrupted during an update or a shutdown. Maybe even some sort of registry thing. Though I have had completely unrelated programs cause faults with midi through USB. Perhaps you can do a recovery to slightly before the issue started. Or maybe someone else has a less drastic option

Hmmm, things I would try:
1-System restore back to when the old FW driver was in use.
2-Ask Yamaha for a link to the old driver and explain what happened(maybe you're not the only one with the issue).
3-Connect the keyboard via midi cables.

[unkJE]

Perhaps there is an “easy fix” - by uninstalling then reinstalling the Yamaha Steinberg FW Driver V1.6.6 for Win (64-bit)

https://europe.yamaha.com/en/support...ver_win64.html