I have upgraded to Windows XP Pro from Win 98 (note: I’m not looking to be told how I should have reformatted my HD first), and during the upgrade, it told me my sound (inegrated Analog Devices SoundMax) may not be compatible, so I chose not to reinstall it later. The rest of the upgrade went smoothly, and XP started working fine, just with no sound. So I tried installing the original drivers that came with my mother board, but they did not work (only occasionaly produced screaching noises instead of correct sounds). So I searched for the XP drivers, and found them here (note, no need to register, use drivers:all as un:pw). Now, here’s where I became really stupid. I noticed some people were complaining about the drivers, but they just said that they wouldn’t install, so I figured before trying to understand the long and poorly written installation procedure given in that one post, I would try to install them, because the worst case seems to be that I wouldn’t have sound. So I did that, and it prompted me to uninstall the old drivers and restart, which I did. It restarted fine, and then continued the installation, but stopped and said “Drivers not found, restart and try again” or something like that. And I did, everything still fine. So I decided to try installation one more time as the dialog box had told me, except I accidentally hit the instillation zip, instead of the setup exe, and it began to unzip automatically. I quickly hit cancel, about a third of the way through the unzip. And then I made another mistake, I decided to just run the setup exe again, w/o fully unzipping the drivers (leaving them with half unzipped from the accidental click, and half from the original unzip). Nevertheless, the setup ran fine, until about 2/3 through, I got an error saying “[file name] is currupt” and giving me the options of retry/skip/ignore. I chose retry two or three times, then hit skip. It then continued until it again gave me the message about “Drivier not found, please restart.” Frustrated, I decided to restart and follow the lengthy instructions in the driverguide post. I did this, and everything booted up fine UNTIL the XP splash screen finished loading. Then instead of the logon screen, I just got an entirley blank black screen with my cursor on it, which I could move. I hit Ctr+Alt+Dlt, but it did nothing, so I hit the restart button. It restarted and did the same thing. Frustrated, I restarted and hit F8 and chose “Restore to last working configuration.” Same thing. I restarted again, and hit F8, and chose Safe Mode- now heres the damning thing- it did the exact same thing, just with white Safe Mode in the corners. I’ve tried it seveal times, and each time I get the same result. I’m at my wits end as to what to do. I only hope the Straight Dope can help me as it has helps so many others. A few last things, I have an Intel mobo, and a ATI adeon 8500LE video card (but I don’t think thats the problem as it was working fine before the sound problem, and it can display the Windows loading splash screen fine), and starting it in VGA mode results in the same problem.
Well, it seems that it was my impatience at fault here. After letting the system sit with the black screen for about 10 minutes, it finally loads, and when I log in, everything works fine. I will deal accordinlgy with the problems, and apologize for this posts. Mods can lock/delete it as they feel necessary.
Just a word of advice:
One of the great things about XP is it’s ability to set up “restore points” that you can always roll back to in the event of a problem with drivers and other such nonsense.
I always make it a practice to set such restore points up before doing any major driver changes such as you did.
If you come back to this thread - you might want to try downloading the latest drivers from Intel’s site, rather than a third party site. It is possible the file you dl’d is corrupt. You don’t mention the specific mobo, so here is a link to the download main page:
http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/support_intel.asp