Donn Lee's blog

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Digital out 3.5 mm mono to Digital Coaxial input: "I spent a few hours trying to get the Audigy 2 ZS digital out working with my Onkyo receiver. Now it is working fine. Here's what I did to get it to work:

1) Buy 6' Audio and Digital-Camera Cable (mono) from Radio Shack. Part No. 42-2444A. One end of this cable is RCA. The other end is 1/8' (3.5mm) mono mini jack.

2) Configure Sampling Rate:
- 'Start -> All Programs -> Creative -> Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS -> Creative AudioHQ'
- Select the 'Sampling Rate' tab
- Select 48 KHz
- Note: 96 KHz did not work for me. No sound.

3) Configure SPDIF Passthrough:
- 'Start -> All Programs -> Creative -> Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS -> Creative AudioHQ'
- Double-click 'Device Controls'
- Select 'Decoder' tab
- Select 'SPDIF Passthrough'

4) Configure Speaker Settings:
- 'Start -> All Programs -> Creative -> Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS -> Creative Speaker Settings'
- Select '2/2.1 Speakers'
- Select 'Digital Output Only'

5) Reboot

Hope this helps. "

Digital out 3.5 mm mono to Digital Coaxial input: "If you simply want to get digital audio (5.1), using the above cable, make sure you change your sound card settings to use digital output only(find it yourself), make sure AC3 encoding on your Sb is on (another word for Digital), and make sure you set it up for two speakers (yes, two). If you try to set it to a 5.1 speaker system, you will only get the left and right audio. This is caused by stupid drivers that assume that if you have selected any more than 2 speakers, you must be using the SB as the digital decoder, and outputs the signals via the independent speaker outputs on the card, even though you have specified digital output. The end result is, with the above settings (you might have to tweak your independent configuration) you will get Dolby Digital 5.1 from your sound card, into your amplifier, and it will sound great. However, because you need to set your sound card up as a 2 speaker (stereo) configuration, your computer games will not play in surround modes properly, simply stereo. Few games (if any) support dolby digital, so you will just have to listen to them in stereo. That means Doom 3 is stereo only. Sorry. "

Digital out 3.5 mm mono to Digital Coaxial input: "Someone on this thread mentioned DEACTIVATING AC3 decoding, and ACTIVATING digital output only on the SB LIVE series for it to work, BUT also mentioned setting your speaker config to 2 speaker config. This makes sense, as the SB LIVE series maps the analogue out centre/subwoofer channel to the digi minijack in 5.1 mode."

Re-installing Windows 2000 (win2k) on a drive >137GB:

Create 6GB FAT32 partition with FDISK off dos boot floppy.
Make partition active.
FORMAT X: /S /Z:16 (8KB clusters).
If hard drive previously had grub/linux, do 'FDISK /MBR' to clear master boot record.
Ensure hard disk is bootable to dos.
Copy win98se install files to C:\win98se
Copy win2k install files to C:\win2k
Install win98se.
Reboot about 2 times to complete install.
From win98se, run setup.exe for win2k. This installs win2k.
Go to Windows Update and upgrade to win2k Service Pack 4.
Enable 48-bit LBA mode by adding registry key:
>> http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;305098
Reboot.
Go to Control Panels, Admin Tools, Disk Management.
Right click on unallocated disk space.
Create partition. Type: NTFS