sound card and hard drive dilemas

[joneboyniu]

I have a Gateway G6-350 that was purchased, i believe, back in 1998. It was running windows 98 up until a couple of days ago. it was running farely decently with its 10Gig hard drive.

I decided that i wanted a heftier hard drive, so i went to newegg.com to purchase a samsung 120G hard drive. i had a computer science major friend of mine take out the 10 gig, install the 120 gig, and also put XP on it for me.

I have since run into two problems. the first being that the computer is only reading 30 of the 120 gigs. i dont know what, if anything, can be done about that.

secondly, my sound does not work. i get a beep from the tower of my computer, but no sound comes from my speakers. i tried looking in the add hardware wizard to see if i could find anything there. I found that the "Multimedia Audio Controller" had an exclaimation mark next to it, so i went on with the wizard.

i tried reinstalling this controller, but this window comes up.

"CANNOT INSTALL THIS HARDWARE

Creative AudioPCI (ES1371,ES1373) (WDM)

An error occurred during the installation of the device
The data is invalid."

if anyone could help, i would be greatful...especially if the advice really worked!

thanks
Jon

[NooNoo]

OK, I need to know if you have copied your 98 installation over to the 120gb samsung, or if you put the samsung as a slave drive keeping your original 10gb drive...

The 30gb may be one of two things, that the jumper restricting the drive to 30gb is place or that your bios needs updating.

Bios updates are available at Gateway BUT each bios update is for a specific motherboard. If your machine is online then use the scan here and it should produce the relevant bios updates. If not, download everest in my signature and post what it says about the motherboard. Updating your bios CAN render your motherboard useless.

If you feel bios updates are not worth the risk, then you could invest in a pci ide card. You could then use your hard drive at it's full speed (something the bios update can't do for you).

As for your sound... go into safe mode (press F8) on startup and remove the device(s) with ! in front of it - plus any devices that are duplicates... if you find duplicate devices you must remove both devices since you do not know which one windows is actually using. Then reboot to normal mode and allow the devices to redetect.

Audio drivers - if the scan your pc at gateway doesn't turn them up - you can use this one at creative (who made the card)... some of these drivers can be quite a pain... try this one if those don't work

[joneboyniu]

i actually dont use windows 98 anymore. i have installed a copy of windows xp. i tried to use it with the old 10gig, but the samsung wouldnt let me make it a slave drive....or at least thats what i was told. SO, i took out the old hard drive all together. the 120 is in there running the XP. only reading 30 gigs and having no sound.
thanks for responding.
please do it again
Jon

[NooNoo]

OK, regardless of your OS, you still have to check that the 30gb jumper is not restricting the drive.

You still may have to either update the bios or get a pci ide card.

XP has native driver for the ES1371/1373 - but the data is invalid is a known problem - fix is here