Ive done everything possibly imaginable to get my SB Live 5.1 to detect and nothing. i try running drivers off the creative site. and other drivers people recommend and i get nothing. no detect, nothing. reset the card too. nothing. on board audio works but i paid for my sblive i wanna use it.

please anyone with any ideas i appreciate it

Have you tried reseating the card of moving to a different slot. If you are sure the card isn't already recognized but diabled then I would say its probably defective. When posting here, it is helpful if you acknowledge here that you did of didn't try what was recommended. You have another thread where folks were trying to help. All you said basically was that it wasn't working. We understand that. What you haven't said is what steps you have taken to troubleshoot. I recommended AIDA32 because you weren't sure of the model of your card. Did you identify the card? Did you look for instances of the card in device manager?

I did run AIDA and it said creative soundblaster live 5.1 emu10k1, i located many differnt drivers off of driverguide.com none of which worked. ive reset my card twice, and in different PCI slots. one set of drivers brings my sound up but only briefly. when i reboot the sound is gone. those werent the official drivers from creative they are something that someone else came up with as a substitute and didnt quite work for me. i dont think its defective, cause i only resently reformated and it worked before then. granted it was a long struggle to get it to work but i fluked on it and i cant remember how i did so. As for updating the XP drivers. i dont remember how i would do that anymore. but im willing to try.

forgive my lack of response to the suggestions i did try and i only reposted to keep the thread up top and fresh i know not a good idea. you dont know how much this has been the bane of my sanity lately. i do appreciate the help you are all giving me. so please please help : ) thanks

downward

Are you saying the drivers for SB live 5.1 from the creative site won't work? Are you trying to auto install all software? Choose custom install and choose the driver only. I suspect that there are remenants of creative software in your registry. Download and run Regcleaner. Get it here:
http://www.worldstart.com/weekly-download/archives/reg-cleaner4.3.htm

Have you disabled the onboard sound card?

Ive downloaded the driver packs from creative. they self extract and self install. when they are done they say. unable to find soundblaster hardware. setup will exit. as do pretty much every single one ive tried before that. but this is a soundblaster live 5.1 you must take my word i had it installed before. but since my format i cannot get it to go. i did try regcleaner nifty little prog. i cleaned out all the creative things. and then i disabled the on board sound. and i got nothing again on the auto detect at reboot. ive been on this the past three nights with driver pack after driver pack. nothing works. card couldnt be defective. i didnt move it. until recently to switch pci slots to try and set it again, but it wasnt working before then even. and i had it working fine before the format. my on board sound isnt quite compatable with directx9. so im going to keep trying the soundblaster.

thanks. any other suggestions. keep em rolling.

downward

You never stated if any sign of the card shows in device manager. Try safe mode. Do you have the chipset drivers for the MB installed?

the card does show up in the device manager. chipset drivers are in. and no luck in safe mode at all. the more i think about it though the more i realize that i think this thing was OEM and that it took some extreme tweeking to get it to work in the first place. and im having zero luck this time. Creative also wouldnt tell me what the specific specs where on it either. jerks.

the card does show up in the device manager, but as a Multimedia Audio Controller with a ? by it.

odd thing is. the game port is recognized but not the audio.

anyway i can just get some plain vanilla sb drivers? and self install them. or possible get windows to update them for me.

That is how the card should show up. Now you need to update the drivers. The trick is to know which drivers to install. I am suspecting that the card is not a genuine creative SB live 5.1. I beleive it may be a clone card. Possibly an opti or something else. The reason I say that is the "emu 10K1". I suspect that means that your card is emulating the characteristics of a SB live 5.1. I would suggest that you try manually installing the card using the add hardware function in control panel. Instead of letting windows autodetect the card, say you want to select from a list. Then pick from the sound card catagory the most likely card and install it. If no go, remove and try another one. If you do get the card to install, document exactly what the card name is and what drivers it uses. I have noticed that using this method produces mixed results, depending on which windows you are using. What I am saying is that you may have installed this card before with a previous version of windows and had sucess because the necassary drivers were bundled with that version. Doesn't mean that XP will have the same driver set. Look the card over carefully for some hint of who may have made it. Most PnP devices have a white sticker on the card with a bar code and model number. Try googling these numbers to find the exact model. The lesson here is to keep track of installation disks.

Last install was on XP and it worked i did however look last night for the serials on this thing and i got sb0220 got a driver for that model and nothing again. : \ will try some more to get this thing to work then its the struggle with my video card. hope you're ready

Read my post again. Try it.

found out that it was an OEM and that none of the driver update packs ive been trying will work. i was manually installing most everything leading them to .inf after .inf and nothing, nothing, nothing. found a CD at friends house and that should be the fix. cept windows is having some driver conflict and everytime it wants to load up the drivers i installed for some reason. it crashes out xp. nice eh? anyway a repair of windows or a format i got the cd for next install thanks a lot for all the help.

downward