JonD

I thought the whole idea of cloud applications was so that the software company could have complete control of the software (Which is why I avoid most of it). It was my understanding that from version 1 of any cloud software, IT WAS UNDERSTOOD the user would have to abide by certain restrictions, and if they didn't, the company could deactivate the user's copy. Guess I'm just a bit surprised that in the article, it said the company SENT OUT LETTERS, which seems very 1990s -- since I imagined that the first person who used his software past the contract date would not be able to activate. (I stopped using Adobe when they went to the cloud, so I have no idea how they work).

Craig, are you sure it's actually trying to boot off the recovery disc? If it's a DVD burner, try changing to a different sata port. I had a similar problem where the BIOS showed the desired boot order, but nothing I did could make it boot off the first drive... Turned out the CMOS battery was flaking out. I changed it, reset BIOS to default settings, set desired boot settings, saved and restart -- and it worked fine after that (The previous steps are worth trying also even if the CMOS battery is good. Restoring to default can 't hurt - and can sometimes fix a corrupted bios). Another quick thing to try: Unplug the AC power, then hold in power button to drain any static electricity from the board. Good luck!

Have you tried connecting to a different USB port? (Preferably USB2 if available).

Start Sonar with Run as Administrator, then try Dim Pro again. If that doesn't work, maybe this article will help: https://www.cakewalk.com/Support/Knowledge-Base/20080921/Dimension-Pro-x64-not-installed-with-SONAR-8-Producer-Edition

Never install drivers using the enclosed driver disc (You don't know how old the drivers are). Always go to the manufacturer's website and download the latest drivers for your O.S. Also, as Noel pointed out, you may need to do the same for the firmware.

If you have an onboard sound card, install the free ASIO4all driver and see if that combo works. If it does, then you've isolated the Soundblaster as the problem. If the above doesn't help, then the next step is do a clean uninstall/reinstall of Sonar. This includes deleting registry entries, so you need to be careful or let someone who's more tech savvy do it for you (Do a search to find the step-by-step instructions. They've been posted in the old Sonar forums many times).

If you didn't already, make sure to do a RESET of your VSTs before you RESCAN. I noticed that many users forget the reset part and just do the rescan (which won't help in fixing any initialization errors).

I think it's likely. IIRC he posted a few times at the old CW forums as a Sonar user...