a new drive showed up

[mountaineer]

Ive got a problem with my sound blaster live card. No sound is comming from my speakers. In the device mgr. everything seems to be enabled and installed correctly. I did find that Ive got a new drive in my computer though. I only have two drives, a lg cdrw and a lg dvd rom. I now have another dvd rom. What could have happened? How can I remove the extra drive safely? Could I have plugged a drive into the sound card wrong and caused both probems?

[mountaineer]

Now I looked again and both of the dvd roms are gone.

[Cricket]

Hi mountaineer,

What operating system are you using?

Do you have the speakers plugged into the correct jack? Is it plugged into the SoundBlaster card and not the motherboard sound jacks?

Is the speakers turned on? Is the volume set above the lowest setting?

Is there a speaker icon in the systray (next to the clock)? If there is, double click on it and make sure nothing is muted (that you don't want muted).

As for the extra drive showing up, you could try booting into Safe Mode, go into Device Manager and delete/remove any duplicate entries for the drives.

Cricket

[mountaineer]

The spkrs are plugged in correctly. Ive tried every place to plug in. The drives are plugged into the sound blaster. Im not sure it is right. No paperwork came with it. Yes the volume is set above minimal, and no, nothing is muted. The bios show where you should be able to enable the sound blaster. The lettering is blue and wont let me scroll down to it. Cannot change the setting from disabled.

[mountaineer]

Oh, win XP. The mother board is a msi 6330 lite.

[glc]

ALL the bios sound entries are for the onboard sound. They SHOULD be disabled if you use a sound card.

Try removing the audio cables from your optical drives to the card - you don't need them, they are only for analog playback of music CD's and you can enable digital sound.

[mountaineer]

I dont need analog sound for playback? I didnt enable the digital playback. That may be my problem.

[mountaineer]

Other than the audio cables what needs to be plugged into the sound card? If Im using only two desktop speakers do the get plugged in the front channel?

[mountaineer]

Unplugging the audio cables and enabeling digital output helped nothing. No sounds whatsoever on front or rear channels. Very low sound with lots of static on digital output plug. Anything else I should try. And I thought this would be an easy install....

[glc]

No - you enable digital audio on the CD drives themselves so the CD audio plays through the PCI bus instead of through the analog cable (how to do this is dependent on Windows version) - the speakers plug into the analog output (I assume front channel) of the sound card, and they must be powered speakers, not passive speakers.

You *can* use an analog cable from one of the cd drives to the CD audio jack on the sound card - but the reason I had you pull it is because there are other similar jacks on the card that might cause problems if you hook up the cables wrong. There is no *need* to plug anything into the sound card internally - just the speakers into the correct external 1/8 inch jack.

[mountaineer]

I did not figure it out with my pair of powered desktop speakers, but the local computer store was holing a 4 point surround sound system that works perfectly. What a difference over the onboard sound.

[mountaineer]

The disappearing/reappearing drives must have been from me messing with the cables. My ribbon cables arent quite long enough. Also, my video card was causing my system to reboot when I touched the monitor cable. Went back in an reseated everything and all's well again. The speakers really had me stumped. Couldn't for the life of me figure out what I had done wrong. Thanks, GLC