Tech Help Needed - NLE system death

[Adrian Douglas]

While updating my Capture Card Driver my system crashed. Everything installed OK but upon reboot I struck a problem.

Verifying DMI Pool Data fails and hangs, and the letters LI appear on the screen with a flashing cursor. The system dosen't respond to anything other than power off/reset.

It's a Win2000 system and I've tried all the repair/recovery steps using the recovery console and the ERD. I boot up to the command promp using a boot disk and when I change drive to C: it comes up with Invalid Drive Specification. This happens with both my HDDs but not the CD-ROM and the CD burner.

I tried reinstalling Win2000 from the command prompt but it hung with the same symptom again.

Has anyone seen something similar before, the LI, that is. It looks like some sort of MBR virus or something that has infected my CMOS. It's got me. I thought i'd seen pretty much all Windows problems and have never not been able to fix a a problem before.

If anyone has any ideas, I'd be stoked to hear them. Oh, and not 'Go buy a MAC', as I'm seriously thinking about it

[Adrian Douglas]

Just incase anyone was interested, I fixed my problem. I searched the net for anything on LI and all I could find was some old display card virus from 94.

Anyway, I wiped my CMOS data, updated my BIOS, still no change. I decided to reduce the system to the basic configuration. I'd remove all the cards one at a time, rebooting each time. I started with the DV500, nothing. Next, the SCSI controller card, presto, reboot, Win2k. This was strange as the card has been in the system since I bought it and never been a problem.

Now everything was running again, I formatted the drive so I could do a clean windows install. I should have done this in the first place but as it takes nearly a day to download and install all the updates, patches and service pack files for Win2k I chanced it. After installing W2k SP2 etc. I began to rebuild my hardware. First the SCSI card, worked perfectly. Next Premiere/DV500.

Instaling the DV500 is a bit of a mission and takes some doing and a bit of savvy. The board needs to be installed on it's own IRQ which when using a plug'n'play OS such as W2k is not always a simple task. The BIOS has to be configured to assign the DV500 it's own IRQ which meant a reshuffle of cards as IRQ's are shared between PCI slots. After reboot the BIOS showed DV500 at IRQ 10, however Windows showed it, and everything else at IRQ 11. WTF!!! Back to BIOS and manually assigned IRQ's to all PCI devices. Still showing BIOS 10/WIN 11

Installing the driver went OK after a few reboots. Premiere is running OK about 95% of the time, which is prety good for Premiere. Pinnacles DV Tools capture utility won't find anything on my tapes but Prem Batch Capture works fine.

The joys of PC set up. It's not always easy but you learn a bit more along the way. I'm upgrading my motherboard and processor next week, so I just hope all goes well.

[John Locke]

I had a problem with my Mac once. But after I found that the wall plug had worked it's way loose a bit and pushed it in, everything worked fine.

[Eric Emerick]

Thanks for reminding me why I switched to Mac, not that I really needed it.

[Adrian Douglas]

Yeah, it has pretty much put the last nail in the PC editing coffin for me. I'm tired of patching things togeather, waiting for driver updates, etc.

I've got my eye on a new DP1Ghz G4, just gotta get the cash togeather.