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INF connundrum

imperialreign

imperialreign

New Member
Joined
Jul 19, 2007
Messages
7,043 (1.08/day)
Location
Sector ZZ₉ Plural Z Alpha
System Specs
System Name УльтраФиолет
Processor Intel Kentsfield Q9650 @ 3.8GHz (4.2GHz highest achieved)
Motherboard ASUS P5E3 Deluxe/WiFi; X38 NSB, ICH9R SSB
Cooling Delta V3 block, XPSC res, 120x3 rad, ST 1/2" pump - 10 fans, SYSTRIN HDD cooler, Antec HDD cooler
Memory Dual channel 8GB OCZ Platinum DDR3 @ 1800MHz @ 7-7-7-20 1T
Video Card(s) Quadfire: (2) Sapphire HD5970
Storage (2) WD VelociRaptor 300GB SATA-300; WD 320GB SATA-300; WD 200GB UATA + WD 160GB UATA
Display(s) Samsung Syncmaster T240 24" (16:10)
Case Cooler Master Stacker 830
Audio Device(s) Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro PCI-E x1
Power Supply Kingwin Mach1 1200W modular
Software Windows XP Home SP3; Vista Ultimate x64 SP2
Benchmark Scores 3m06: 20270 here: http://hwbot.org/user.do?userId=12313
alright, here's the scenario up to now

between last night and this morning, the HAL.dll library in System32\ up and disappeared, which prevented WIN from booting up this morning - I'd get an error right after POSt and just prior to the boot screen. I went through all the recovery console routines, rebuilding the boot.ini, making sure the boot partition was alright, expanding the .dl_ from the WIN XP CD, etc. Nothing worked. The OS would just lockup at the boot screen . . .

so, I did a repair installation, which left all my hardware drivers and all in limbo, and all apps and drivers had to be removed and then re-installed . . .

but, now I'm getting errors with applications that access the SYS itself - SpeedFan, PC Probe, ASUS AI Suite, Audio Console, etc - at app startup, they tend to return errors citing invalid address, or other hardware access errors . . .

which, leads me to assume that WIN needs the chipset drivers re-installed. That'd be fine, except that the repair installation doesn't remove these drivers, and because WIN doesn't actually see anything wrong with them (no flag in System Properties dialog), and they're not out of date, any attempts to re-install the INF drivers appear to not be working.

Even trying to manually re-install them through the System Properties dialog, WIN is for some reason preventing me from removing the drivers from each listed piece of hardware.



So, my question, is there any way to remove the installed chipset package so that I can run the INF update utility again?

Or, am I stuck with having to do a clean re-install of the OS . . . again?
 
Booting into safe mode may work for you. That way you can remove the chipset drivers. I believe Driver Cleaner may also help you through safe mode.
 
WarEagleAU said:
Booting into safe mode may work for you. That way you can remove the chipset drivers. I believe Driver Cleaner may also help you through safe mode.
Click to expand...

you by chance know if Intel has a utility to do so, or do I need to try looking up some 3rd party apps?

It's been a little frustrating, as Intel doesn't have all that much on the X38 series up yet, and ASUS' INF update utility (provided by Intel) is actually more up to date than the utility on Intel's site :shadedshu

I haven't tried Safe Mode yet . . . Ima give that a shot real quick . . .
 
This should work.

*edit*

Wow, you were all over that one.

It still points you to the same utility for X38. Take a look...
 
true . . . I guess Intel wraps all their chipset drivers into the same installer . . .

anyhow, I was able to uninstall all the hardware drivers from WIN in safe mode (not sure why I didn't think of that from the get-go); re-booted the rig and am now installing the INF drivers provided off ASUS' site (they're version 8.3.1.1011; as compared to Intel's .1010 version), with the -overall flag.

we'll see how it goes


<edit>
well . . . now the OS recognizes both PCI devices correctly, along with all the hardware - although, apps that are accessing the SYS still seem to be causing errors. I'm going to try removing and then installing them and see if that works.

I might also run a quick scan of the registry for any errs
 
Last edited:
What are the errors specifically?

I JUST reinstalled my entire desktop a few days ago and am having issues with programs starting to fail.

Wondering if it pertains to this driver set?
 
Dr. Spankenstein said:
What are the errors specifically?

I JUST reinstalled my entire desktop a few days ago and am having issues with programs starting to fail.

Wondering if it pertains to this driver set?
Click to expand...

well, bit of an update - after re-installing the chipset drivers through Safe Mode, WIN was able to detect my PCI devices, so I went ahead and installed drivers for those . . .

then I removed all the software that wasn't running correctly, and re-installed them - still had issues

so I ran a registry cleaner, and came back with 860 some odd errors in registry :twitch: - cleaned the registry, rebooted, and was still having problems with software.

specifically, I'd get error windows that read along the lines of "Access violation at addess 00000000: Read of address 00000000" or "I/O dll failure" or "xxxx failed to initialize properly (0x------)" or some other similar program access violation/error. It seemed to only be software that directly accesses either the loaded BIOS, or hardware (i.e. PC Probe, SpeedFan, AI Suite, CoreTemp, etc).

Anyhow, I was just so friggin fed up with it last night, I just decided to do another clean install of XP. I had setup do a full format of the drive, re-partition and install the OS.

So far, everything seems alright . . .




Damn, y'know, I feel like I'm running WIN98 again :ohwell:
 
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