Big problems with new soundblaster Z

pieman109

pieman109

pieman109

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21 Oct 2002
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As title. I had one of these (oem) delivered from ocuk this afternoon, great I thought. I installed it correctly, disabled onboard sound in the bios (mobo in sig below), went to restart and straight away got a blue screen with "bad system config info" message.
Umpteen restarts , faffing about in safe mode, booting from a usb stick, repairing files and 6 six hours later, I've got a pc that'll boot most of the time, but will some times Bsod to that problem page. I know you can sometimes get these probs but, flippin' heck (my language at the time was lot coarser), I've never had this amount of ball ache from a hardware installation.
Anyone else had this, and if so, how did they reliably fix it?
 
Creative and bsods have been known in the past but this was a many years ago, quite surprised any issues really.

I would remove the Z soundcard and retest your pc and see if your pc is able to perform more stable and bsod free, just to eliminate any other reason a bsod c maybe occurring.

Also this is quite handy to eliminate if the cards just plain faulty or not, try it on another pc and see if you get a bsod or not.

If its working in the other pc at least you know its your software perhaps causing the bsod/issue. Try and update windows via windows update and make sure its fully up to date, remove all soundcard drivers including the ones from your motherboard and any others like the Z drivers even.

Download latest Z drivers from creative website, try and install the Z in another pci express slot further away from the one you just did, and then reload the new Z drivers you just downloaded and retry again.

Its about eliminating what is causing the bsod really....
 
Well, the first thing I did was get the thing outta me pc, and clear all remnants of the drivers that I could find and the problems still continued. I used the latest drivers downloaded from creative but couldn't try 'em out 'cos I couldn't get into windows! I can safely say I won't be using any creative sound cards in the near future, and I realise that I might just have been unlucky, but after everything was uninstalled (both hardware and software) my problems are still continuing, so something has done the damage although I tend to think its a software issue but these were not installed before the bsods started.
Anyways, I'll not be using this hardware again and its going back to ocuk tomorrow.
 
pieman109 said:
Well, the first thing I did was get the thing outta me pc, and clear all remnants of the drivers that I could find and the problems still continued. I used the latest drivers downloaded from creative but couldn't try 'em out 'cos I couldn't get into windows! I can safely say I won't be using any creative sound cards in the near future, and I realise that I might just have been unlucky, but after everything was uninstalled (both hardware and software) my problems are still continuing, so something has done the damage although I tend to think its a software issue but these were not installed before the bsods started.
Anyways, I'll not be using this hardware again and its going back to ocuk tomorrow.
Click to expand...

The bad system config error is nothing to do with the creative card, there was a previous problem with your PC and the install of the new card just pushed it over the edge. It's usually the sign of a failing hard drive and/or corrupt registry. Sometimes it's faulty memory. What tends to happen is exactly what happened with you, install new hardware, which writes changes to the registry, registry is already corrupt so when you reboot you get a blue screen.

do you have windows 7 or windows 10? Try booting into safe mode and checking the hard drive for errors. If you have windows 10, try the automatic repair. There are other things you can do, BCD repair, Repairing the registry by overwriting the current system files with backups. Or just resetting windows 10.
 
Make sure everything is seated properly and clean of dust especially around sockets, etc. I put a NIC into a machine recently and afterwards had all kinds of BSODs which at first I thought was due to the NIC/drivers - from what I can make out while having the system open I must have disturbed some dust that got into the socket of another addin card - atleast after giving everything a dust off with an aircan and reseating all problems went away.
 
melmac said:
The bad system config error is nothing to do with the creative card, there was a previous problem with your PC and the install of the new card just pushed it over the edge. It's usually the sign of a failing hard drive and/or corrupt registry. Sometimes it's faulty memory. What tends to happen is exactly what happened with you, install new hardware, which writes changes to the registry, registry is already corrupt so when you reboot you get a blue screen.

do you have windows 7 or windows 10? Try booting into safe mode and checking the hard drive for errors. If you have windows 10, try the automatic repair. There are other things you can do, BCD repair, Repairing the registry by overwriting the current system files with backups. Or just resetting windows 10.
Click to expand...

How do I do a complete reinstal of windows 10 64bit and still leave all my documents, games, email setup, etc (windows live mail, I know, no-one likes it but we've become so used to it its difficult to try summat else)
 
pieman109 said:
How do I do a complete reinstal of windows 10 64bit and still leave all my documents, games, email setup, etc (windows live mail, I know, no-one likes it but we've become so used to it its difficult to try summat else)
Click to expand...
There's option for keeping personal data when doing full "reset" install of Windows.
But that would remove data of installed programs, at least as far as Windows is considered.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/reset-your-windows-10-system-with-the-keep-my-files-option/
Though don't see why it would remove any application files which aren't folders of Windows.
That's why I always recommend splitting mass storage at least to two partitions and installing games and such to other than OS partition.

Advanced Options should give ability to use restore points.
Windows might have well auto-installed some bad/corrupted drivers or installed some broken patch during reboots.

Also have you made sure all cables etc are firmly attached inside PC?
Doesn't always need much to accidentally nudge something little loose.

And as you apparently have plenty of drives have you tried with only OS drive attached?
 
Nothing beats a full fresh windows installation imo and perhaps then use the free reflect home edition to clone your fresh windows install right after, then another with all latest drivers installed, then another with some basic apps....... then another once all is golden.

May sound strange doing all those back up images but then you can go back to any point before any weird windows issues occurred.

Reinstalling windows from fresh also allows you to correctly test each step of the way to find out what may have caused any weird issues, but in my experience
it usually solves most issues unless your hardware faulty.
 
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