Registered: Jan 2001
Location:
Posts: 16

Speedloader trashed my system!

Actually, I have everything working now, but I thought I'd give my experience, hoping it prevents someone else from having the same problem I had.

I tried installing my Innogear SpeedLoader last night. The SpeedLoader program installed fine. I then plugged in the SpeedLoader USB module and my system deteced the new hardware. However, while trying to install the drivers, it wanted a file, EUSBMMC.CAT (or something similar--the error is NOT in front of me now). It asked for my win98SE CD-ROM, but the file could not be found on it. I also checked all of my hard drives and the SpeedLoader CD-ROM. The file was NOT anywhere. I then told windows to "skip" the file. I received no other errors.

Next, I ran the SpeedLoader program. It gave an error on trying to read the MMC module, then said the module was either missing or not formatted correctly. This is where I made my big mistake! I told it to format the module. It took a long time to do this, but produced NO errors. However, when it was done, I learned that it had trashed my entire 18GB SCSI hard drive. Evidently, it wrote the proprietary minijam file structure to my entire drive, therefore, overwriting everything on the drive. I tried to fix it using Norton Disk Doctor, but weas unsuccessful. My computer would now not even boot--even using a floppy. Note that my system boots from one of the IDE drives normally. The only way I could get the system to boot was to disable the SCSI BIOS, which prevented access to the SCSI hard drive from DOS. Partition Magic was able to find the drive under windows, and I could give it instructions to reformat the drive, however, it needed to actually perform the tasks in DOS mode--but in DOS mode, it couldn't find the drive. If I re-enabled the SCSI BIOS, then I couldn't boot at all! I had to use the SCSI card's low-level format to rescue my disk.

Needless to say, this took quite a lot of time to figure out and fix. I lost ALL of the data on that drive (of course, I was having problems with my backup software, so it was not backed up--but nothing on it at the time was important).

Today, I again tried to install the drivers, with the same error (I did NOT try to format again!). I finally went into device manager and manually reinstalled the drivers which allowed me to use the SpeedLoader properly--including formatting MMC cards.

I still do not know why the "normal" install process did not work.

Hope this warning helps save someone from disaster!

--Bob

Registered: Aug 2000
Location: Alive and well on VisorCentral.com
Posts: 861

Sorry to hear that, my speedloader installed without a hitch.. works pretty well, the only bug I noticed was that the speedloader program fails if you try to copy an mp3 with a REALLY long file name.. it crashes, you can just restart it.

I guess you shouldn't have skipped that file when it was installing.. Also, you didn't say if you rebooted before you tried using the speedloader, I bet the problem lies between the missing file you skipped and no reboot.

__________________
"One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no �them� out there. It�s just an awful lot of �us�." -- Douglas Adams