MORE Theater 550 Problems (Reward for fixing)

[Cooper42020]

Hey everyone,

now we have a continuation to my own experiance of running the Theater550 card for months and then all of a sudden having major issues.

I will run down the system config and then the issue.

ASUS A8N-E (BIOS 1008)
AMD Athlon64 3700+
2x 512MB RAM (Kingston)
GeForce 6200TC
Plextor SATA DVD-RW
WD 150GB Raptor
XP MCE


This setup is almost identical to my system at home.

I installed windows on the system last night, all brand new parts, set up the BIOS and everything (I've built close to 2,000 systems in my life so config is close to perfect)

Once windows and every other driver were installed, I went for the theater 550. I installed it and during the setup the system hangs, first windows, then i cant open the start menu, then the mouse freezes, then they keyboard goes and the system is F'ked.

Upon reset this is where the fun begins.

Windows is now F'ked. The Optical storage device driver can't be loaded, the sound driver can't be loaded, Plug and Play software device enumerator can not load. (All "Code 39")

What the hell?

As I've stated before, my home system worked PERFECTLY FINE for months on end, and then all of a sudden these issues happened.

I've now built a brand new system with the same basic confiuration as mine and it doesn't work.

I've started to question if this is ATI, ASUS or nVidia's problem.

I'm going to try moving the BIOS back, as the one major constant is the motherboard.

Anyone from ATI around? You deserve a massive raise if you can solve this one.

You know what... I'll give someone a free 512MB DDR400 Kingston module if they can solve this issue by Monday night for me. If I don't get to it first, I will ship it to whomever solves this.

Thanks!

[Jrunner]

I think my ATI Theater 550 Pro has also caused major problems on my system. It's home-built and a couple months old, with a Biostar GeForce 6100-M7, AMD Sempron 64 2800+, 2 Gigs DDR400, two 250-gig WD SATA drives, Audigy 2 ZS sound card, PowerColor Radeon X300SE video card w/256 MB onboard, couple of CD/DVD burners, and of course the Theater 550 (PCI-Express X1 version).

I had the system running good and didnt install the Theater 550 until later. Installed the latest driver for it from the internet, then the latest CyberLink PowerCinema software. Installation was okay, and it detected all the cable channels and FM channels. It worked playing a TV channel a few minutes, then froze the system. I reset and the system restarted and looked okay. Ran PowerCinema again... same result. This time, WindowsXP was somehow damaged. It will not complete the bootup process and hangs during driver load. This happens no matter if you use the various Safe Modes, Last Known Good Config, or Start Normal. The last driver to load is Mup.sys and there's an extensive thread about Mup.sys at:
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/31874/
but that discussion has no unique solution. The only way I could get back running was to reinstall XP. I guess I'll be removing the 550. Too bad cause it has all the features I was looking for at a good price.

[Cooper42020]

Unfortunatley it's come to this.

I've given up. I can't find anyone who has any ideas, And it's been way too long.

I've ordered an XFX NVTV Card and hope that it works well, at least it's got hardware MPEG-2 encoding... so that's good.

Thanks for anyone who tried to help, and if you still have ideas, please drop them in.


Cheers

[mike911]

Hi Cooper, just to let you know you are not alone. I am having the exact same issues you are.

I was building a htpc, using a biostar 6100 m7, sempron 64 2800+, msi theater 550 pro, 1gig ram, 200gb sata drive. Everything was perfecly stable for a week until I received the theater 550 pro card.

Upon driver install, windows froze, after a reboot, the drivers were not installed, so I downloaded the newest ones from ati website. They installed ok, but upon reboot, windows locked several times at the moving bar/loading screen. After a few reboots, it booted into windows, but crashed randomly in powercinema and the desktop. Thinking it was a conflict, I swapped the card to another pci slot, cleared the cmos and reinstalled everything.

After the reinstall, the same random crashes started after the ati drivers install. I uninstalled the drivers and rebooted, took out the card, but upon entering xp, system manager showed
"The Optical storage device driver can't be loaded, the sound driver can't be loaded, Plug and Play software device enumerator can not load"

The only way to fix this was reinstalling again. This time I didn´t install the ati card drivers, and it has been running without crashing for a week. I was looking everywhere on the net for someone with similar problems until I found your post.

Maybe we can help each other. I am thinking it is some kind of resource conflict, I will test that tonight.

[mike911]

I have found that some motherboards require a new bios for the ati theater 550 to work.

http://extended64.com/blogs/wiak/default.aspx
http://reviews.cnet.com/ATI_TV_Wonde...1278064-2.html

I am upgrading my board to the lastest bios to see if it helps. I cannot figure out how this same card works on another 3 year old pc and not on the new one.

[picachux]

My Giga-Byte K8N Ultra-9 would'nt boot when I first purchased the Theater 550pro when it first came out. Luckily Giga-Byte were already aware of the problem and had a bios update ready that addressed the issue even though it wasnt specifically mentioned on the changelog. The technician I was in contact with about the issue told me the new bios should fix the problem and it did.

[mike911]

Did a new test tonight, reinstalled everything. Now the ati drivers wont even finish installing. XP crashes before it completes the install. The drivers must be causing a conflict with something else. As I cannot disable anything to test this, I gues the card will have to be returned.

[Cooper42020]

I've noticed that there is a new BIOS for my board. So far I've given up and replaced it with an NVTV card.

I will wait until I sell a system with an A8N-E again, try to install it screwed up, then update the BIOS and see if ASUS has fixed it yet.

Cheers!

[mike911]

I found the problem. Using a Ide hard disk solved the conflict!! It booted right away,installed powercinema and everything works ok. As soon as I connect a serial ata hard disk, my pc won´t even enter windows when the ati theater is connected. Hope it helps your problem.

[Cooper42020]

It barley helps, but thanks

See the Problem is that I'm not going to buy a new drive because not only do I have a 160GB and 400GB SATA drive, but wouldn't they end up being useless now if it doesnt like SATA drives?

AND.... This card worked in my system with these drive in there for almost 6 months.

Such a stupid issue, heh

[KeredRednaxela]

I'm having a similar problem. For a couple months i had the tuner in my machine running perfectly fine and then one day it started to have problems. first the video would freeze, and i wouldnt be able to quit windows media center or bring up the task manager. but i could still use firefox and aim. then firefox would freeze. then aim would freeze. then the mouse would stop moving and i would have to restart.

I'm running Windows Vista on:
Asus A8N-SLI SE Socket 939
AMD Dual core Athlon 64 X2 4200+
SLI Nvidia Geforce 8600 GTS
4x512 Corsair XMS DDR memory
One SATA HDD with my OS on it, and two IDE HDD
Theater 550, Extra PCI ethernet card and a Physx card

Now it cuts right to the chase and my entire computer will freeze without warning when I'm watchng TV. Then it will blue screen and when I restart it, windows tells me either my motherboard, CPU, memory or power supply is busted.

So basically I have no idea whats wrong.

[Cooper42020]

I ended up replacing my motherboard, so that's always an option

I think it might be related to the A8N series for some reason.

I had an A8N-E and moved to an M2N-E

Anyway, my best advice.

Download the newest mobo BIOS. Latest chipset, video and Theater 550 drivers and see what happens.

Catalyst 7.10 was just released and now covers both video and tv-tuner drivers.

I also ended up moving to the Theater 650, nice bit of an upgrade to the card, but why spend another $80 on a new card...