Advice needed: Windows 7 ignoring drivers (828 Mk II)

[entilza72]

Hi gang,

Looking for some advice. I've bought a second hand MOTU 828 Mk II. I have installed the Firewire/USB opetion of the latest Windows installer. No problems reported. Rebooted as instructed.

When the device is powered up, Win 7 detects an "unknown device" and begins to search for drivers. This shouldn't happen because the installer should have installed the drivers already. It doesn't find any drivers, and the device is left unusable.

Uninstalling and reinstalling the MOTU drivers package (and rebooting) changes nothing.

It shows up under Device Manager as "Unknown Device". The MOTU software reports it cannot detect a MOTU device on Firewire and quits.

Does anyone have any advice?

Thanks,
Jason

[entilza72]

I can confirm the same device installs its drivers just fine on Windows XP. Unfortunately, the machine I need to use is Windows 7 64 bit.

Cheers,
Jason.

[1nput0utput]

Right-click on the unknown device in Device Manager, and choose Update Driver. Let Windows search for the driver automatically.

[entilza72]

Hi there,

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I had already selected "Update Driver" for the Unknown Device under Device Manager, without success. It is basically the same loop as the original "New device detected" loop.

First it checks the Windows/Microsoft site for drivers, and fails to find any.

Then it checks locally stored drivers (I have no idea where it is actually checking) and fails to find any.

Then you can opt to manually locate the drivers. If you choose this, it will want you to nominate a directory where the drivers are found. Of course, they are nowhere to be found because they are packaged as part of an installer.

You also have the option to manually choose the device under a hardware list. However, MOTU is not listed as an Audio device under the Windows hardware list.

Cheers,
Jason

[1nput0utput]

Try uninstalling MOTU Hardware in the Programs and Features section of the Windows Control Panel. Then restart the computer and run the current MOTU driver installer again.

[entilza72]

Hi again 1nput0utput,

I've uninstalled, bebooted, reinstalled and rebooted many times. It makes no difference. It's as if I never installed the package.

There's something really screwy with how Win 7 is identifying (or not) the device. It knows its there, but it won't identify.

I would have assumed there was something wrong with the device's firewire port. However I have seen this device work on a Mac and Windows XP just fine. It's just having trouble with my Win 7 (I need to find someone else with Win 7 to test to eliminate my PC hardware).

Do you know if you can just get the driver files as stand-alone files and not in an install package? Windows gives you the option to specify the files - if I could do that, hopefully I could skip this identification part.

1nput0utput, I really appreciate your taking the time to offer help.

Cheers,
Jason

[entilza72]

Additional info:

I went into "Hardware & Sound" where I can list the system's "Devices and Printers". There I was able to right click on the Unknown Device and select "Troubleshoot". The Troubleshoot program was unable to fix the issue, but it was pretty clear about this:

"The driver for the unknown device is not installed".

This error report is consistant with the behaviour I have been seeing.

Either:
A) The Windows package is failing to install the right driver where it can be found/used, OR
B) The system is plain unable to identify the MOTU 828 Mk II.

Cheers,
Jason.

[1nput0utput]

I don't think that MOTU makes the individual driver files available separately from the installer. Maybe you should get in touch with tech support. There might be an installer log file that can tell them what is causing the problem.

[entilza72]

I opened a case with them about a day ago. Initial advice gave me something different to try (downgrading the firewire to a legacy firewire Windows driver), but yielded no improvement. I'll post up the solution, if we get one.

Thanks again for making the effort to help - and if anyone else had ideas, please let me know!

Cheers,
Jason

[entilza72]

Hi gang, here's how it was fixed. Kudos to the MOTU techs for finding it.

Uninstalling and reinstalling the MOTU package (including drivers) had no impact.

The techs then suggested I go to Add/Remove Programs, right click on the MOTU program and select "Repair" (the repair option is not presented if you run the installer again). This was done with the device turned off.

After repair ran, I turned on the device and 3 MOTU devices were detected and installed their driver!

So thanks to everyone for their help!

Cheers,
Jason.