PT5.1.1 / W98 : How good is your memory?

[Buzz Moschetti]

Hello again. On the advice of some folks on this board, I got a new C: drive for my W98 P3 machine circa 2001 after the drive went bad. I used the W98 Reinstall disk to put the OS back on.

I then took 1 of my PT LE 5.1.1 CDs (I have 2 identical disks; don't know why they shipped 2) and ran the installer. It seemed to install OK, but at the end claimed that I needed to install WaveDriver98.

The readme file for WaveDriver98 says the W98 plug-n-play engine should find the new hardware and prompt for drivers but it didn't.

The Device Manager sees three devices that are the Digi001 card but there are no devices associated with it.

I tried to update drivers for the "PCI Multimedia Audio Device" but it wouldn't accept the .INF file in the WaveDriver98 directory as a valid driver.

It's late so I will try again tomorrow. In the meantime: any clues anyone? I haven't upgraded PT LE because until my drive blew up it worked fine. No need to change.

[Bob Legs]

hmmm
i think there was something about "add hardware" rather than update driver...
if theres any PDF or anything that came with the driver, u should check it out.

[Buzz Moschetti]

Will try that.

I'm a bit leery of the fact that all this WaveRunner stuff -- including the readmes in the install folder -- refers to the AudioMedia III card, not the Digi001 PCI card. Is that why I have 2 PT LE install disks? The Digi001 kit shipped with 4 disks: 2 each for Windows and Mac.

Other aspects of the reinstall look very promising, including the fact that there appear to be generic disk drivers to the drives, not the Intel ATA 100 drivers that came pre-installed with the PC and were identified as a problem and had to be pulled off. The Digi help desk guy talked me through all of that and it wasn't trivial.

[Buzz Moschetti]

Unreal. After 5 years I forgot which of the three unknown audio-like devices was the real target for the the Digi001 PCI card drivers. This evening I came home from work and simply chose the second, "PCI Audio Device", and hit "Update Drivers" and nav'd to the WaveDriver98 directory of the PT LE disk. It recognized the Digi001 driver, installed it, and that was that.

I fired up ProTools and it ran. In fact it runs GREAT. How great? I was able to record a track with buffers set to 256 while still in the default hardware profile -- WITH THE NETWORK CARD ENABLED. After a while I got the hardware timeout error at which point I suddenly noticed Mozilla was up. Unreal!

I created the ProTools profile and set it up with disabled network devices. The machine boots in about 20 seconds and doesn't hiss, hum, grind, or mysteriously go to an hourglass cursor.

I had NONE of the performance problems I had the first time that required undoing all the drivers that had come preloaded on the machine.

THANK YOU to all on the DUC who recommended I first try a new C: drive and reinstalling rather than giving up and buying a Mac.

P.S. Never throw anything away! I was able to activate PT because I still had the Getting Started manual that has the activation code and I still had the D-Verb activation floppy disks.