Okay here's the scenario. Up till yesterday my computer was running W7 with no problems, using a Creative XtremeGamer PCI sound card. Last night I installed Snow Leopard on my secondary drive and quickly found out that my sound card didn't work with OS X. I did some thinking and remembered that my mobo (Maximus formula), came packaged with some crappy sound card, the Supreme FX II. I looked up the audio chip and found that it had been reported to work with OS X. My plan was to have both soundcards installed in my system, but only have one being used at a time - XtremeGamer when using Windows, SupremeFX when using SL. The problem is that when I put the SupremeFX in my system alongside the Creative and booted W7 to check if it worked, Windows went apes**t and stopped detecting any audio device whatsoever. The first time I booted with both cards, it didn't recognize the SupremeFX. I loaded up device manager and clicked scan for hardware changes and my system locked up. I restarted and after that it doesn't recognize either one of the cards. I've tried both together, both individually, and W7 doesn't find anything. Obviously this is unacceptable. I'm not even concerned right now with getting both to work, I just want at the very least, to have my XtremeGamer functional again. How can I get W7 to recognize it (please don't say reformat, I don't have a current backup and would lose a lot of data) and get things back to the way they were? Please help! Thank you in advance!
If you can do a system restore, that will probably work. So point to a previous restore date, and make sure the other card is removed from its pci slot, so that your XtremeGamer card is once again the only one.
Since you had both an on-board and add-in soundcard active at the same time, it could simply be a resource conflict. Have you tried disabling the on-board one to see if the add-in card resumed working? Also, if you have an option to reset the Plug and Play data in your bios, this may correct the conflict by resetting the IRQ/DMA/IO of all PNP devices, and might correct the problem, allowing both to remain active. I can't really tell you what this option is caled in your case, because different bios and boards call it different things, and some don't even have the option. But I'd try to reset the PNP data first (if you have that option), if that doesn't fix it then disable the onboard, if that still doesn't work then roll back like genuine says. Has any other hardware begun to act up, or is it only the sound cards? Those creative cards can sometimes be picky and do weird things when other sound cards are present. It seems mostly to be the creative drivers that do this, rather than the hardware itself.
I should have clarified about the second sound card. It's not "onboard", that is, it's not built into the motherboard. It's just a s**tty mini-pci card that is packaged with the mobo. The only BIOS option related to audio is enable/disable High Definition Audio, and I'm not sure exactly what that relates to. Members on another forum suggested that I do a repair of the windows installation and reinstall drivers. What I want, ideally, is to have the creative card working in windows just like it used to be, and to have the SupremeFX card installed, but not being initialized. I assume the best way to do this would be to install the SupremeFX card first, disable it in device manager permanently, then install the Creative Card. That way every time I switch OSes into W7, I don't have to physically take the SupremeFX card out of the computer, it just won't be initialized by the OS to begin with. Since the creative card doesn't even get recognized by Snow Leopard to begin with, I don't have to make any additional changes there, and I can have 2 cards physically installed at the same time. Am I correct in thinking this?
Have you tried my suggestion above ? Remove the other, leave only the Xtreme. Then do a system restore.
Well I got the issue fixed after a bit of troubleshooting. I had to uninstall a bunch of drivers manually, do startup repair, run driver sweeper, etc, etc, and finally it recognized the XtremeGamer card again. Got drivers installed and it worked just like before. After that I decided to ditch the SupremeFX piece of crap and bought a $50 X-Fi "Go!" USB card which works flawlessly both in W7 and SL. No conflicts to speak of, the only hassle is I have to switch which one my speakers are plugged into. No big deal. thanks for the help guys!
Glad you got it working again. Creative drivers can be picky and stubborn, glad you were able to correct the problem they were causing!