Add hardware wizard locks up

[giltheissen]

Bought an older Tyan Titan AT for a P-200mmx I had laying around. Booted with just the video card, formatted and loaded Win98 OK. But can't add the modem.
It's an ISA modem, but the add hardware wizard locks up immediately. Tried forcing it without the wizard in contol panel-modems, and although Win found it and I loaded drivers, but then it couldn't open the COM port (tried Com 2 & 4 and IRQ's 3&5) (Serial mouse on COM 1). Looked OK in Device Manager but won't dial out and can't get "more info" in control panel-modem because it can't open the port.
Removed the modem both physically and in Dev. Man. and then tried running the Add hardware wizard with nothing new added and it still locked up immediately. So I obviously have an independent problem with the wizard. Windows was able to find and accept the drivers for a PCI sound card, but this problem with the wizard is stumping me and I don't know if it's the cause of my COM port problem or not.
Any ideas?
Thanks - Gil Theissen

[MADMAC]

Hi Gil,
You don't say whether you have a program disk for the Modem,
I am presuming the answer is yes.
first try removing the modem completely from your system, delete from device manager etc.
Power down and physically remove the modem.
Power up and install the software for the modem.
Power down then install the modem, and then reboot, a lot of modems ( particularly zoom ) require installation of the software before the installation of the modem.
if that doesn't work, then check that you are actually installing the modem
some other modems, set up a serial port controller before installing the modem, if you are having to force the driver in then you could possibly be installing the modem driver in place of the Serial port device which would give you similar symptoms.

[giltheissen]

Thanks for the reply. I'm sending this from the pc that I was comp-laining about earlier.. Just got it set up a few minutes ago. I think the problem was with my hdd. Did a reformat, and noticed it was having a hard time,so I ran a complete surface scan and found several bad sectors. Hadscandisk "repair" them and then did a complete reinstall of Windows. This time hardware wizard worked and the modem is in.
Thanks for your suggestion buit while I was wai5ting, I actually tried everything you suggested to no avail. The fact that the hardware wizard froze immediately when there wasn't even anything to find made me suspect a bad installation of Windows. I'm guessing but perhaps some of the OS was written to those bad sectors.
Anyway, I do appreciate your help though.
Thanks --Gil Theissen