SBIG driver problem

[Jon]

Hello All,

I am a new member who just moved here from Florida where I was an active member of the Southwest Florida Astronomical Association. I was happy to see what a great organization you have here! Hopefully, I will meet many of you at the star party tonight and at the next meeting.

Anyway, to my latest problem. I have an SBIG ST-8300C that I run with a windows 7 laptop. The other night, I was setting up for a shot of the Whirlpool Galaxy when I noticed that my camera would not be recognized by any of my capture programs. Prior to this the camera worked fine. When I got back inside, I hooked the camera up to my XP desktop and it worked fine.

I deleted all the drivers and software for the camera and went to the SBIG web site to download the newest versions of everything. After installation, I plugged in the camera and windows would not initialize the installation process even though the 64 bit driver installation program showed that the drivers were installed correctly.

After messing around with this problem for a couple of hours, I decided to reinstall windows 7 (what a hassle). After I got everything loaded again and updated, I tried the camera again. No dice. It still would not initialize the installation process. After talking with SBIG, I loaded all the software in my wifes windows 7 desktop, went into the windows system32/drivers file and copied the files from there and then transferred them to my laptop. I did this because I thought there may be a problem with SBIGs driver updater program. I should note that every other peripheral including my guide camera and my planetary webcam loads just fine.

Well, this time windows recognized the camera and loaded the drivers. I could now find the SBIG annotation in the device manager which I could not do before. So, everything should work now, right? Not so fast! The capture programs STILL could not connect to the camera.

I talked with SBIG again and told them that this must be a driver issue on windows 7 machines. He said they would try to duplicate the problem and would get back to me.

Has anyone else had this type of problem with windows 7 and an SBIG camera driver?


Jon

[stargazer_tom]

Well for one thing, the copy might not have really worked if there were supposed to be regestry entries. Those would not have copied. I suspect the old entries from your previous install were still there. I suspect the issue is in the regestry. I run Win7 64bit on my observatory machine and it has no issues with my ST2k. I bet you need to uninstall and then hunt sbig entries in the regestry and delete them.

Oracle is this way. You have to manually clean the regestry!

[AllanR]

Have you by chance tried swapping USB cables? Kinda sounds like a cable issue to me.

Allan

[Jon]

Thanks for the help.

Yes, I had already tried different cables to no avail but, the good news is that I got the camera working! I don't know what happened but I tried it the other day and it worked. I did nothing to the registry and did not try to reinstall anything. Maybe the driver is unstable. I hope it continues to work.


Jon