No CD ROM or ZIP drive in Win95

[eggcat]

I flipped on my PC last week and it gave me an error that "hardware was not found" and my CD and ZIP were unavailable under Win95. I tried reseating plugs and cables, but the drives are still not recognized under Windows. When I boot in MS DOS mode, I can use both drives with no problem. I have tried the "add new hardware" feature, but it says that it does not detect any new hardware. Device Manager shows that both my Primary and Secondary IDE controllers are not functioning properly. I'm not sure what to do! TIA for help.

[Paleo Pete]

Right click My Computer on the desktop, and click Properties click the Performance tab and see if it has a white box that says some drives are running in MS DOS Compatibility Mode.

If so: Troubleshooting MS DOS Compatibility Mode (http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q130/1/79.asp)

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If you had everything...Where would you put it?

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)

[This message has been edited by Paleo Pete (edited 11-09-2000).]

[eggcat]

Thank you - an excellent article that helped me target just what is wrong - my esdi_506.pdr is not loading properly. The article indicates that I should extract this file from the Windows CD, but my Windows files are stored on my C: drive in .CAB files. Do you know how I would go about extracting this .pdr file from the CAB files on my hard disk? Alternately, the article suggested I run setup with a verify option. I'm not sure what they're talking about there - do you think that could be an option for me as well?

[eggcat]

OK, I'm starting to obsess over this problem. I search the Knowledge Base and found out how to extract from CAB files. I found the required ESDI_506.pdr and copied it to my c:\windows\system\iosubsys directory, but the problem remains completely unchanged. I re-ran Windows with the Bootlog.txt enabled and it still indicates that esdi_506.pdr fails to load. I'm truly at an impass now - I look forward to your reply.

[Hafizullah]

You may have a boot-sector virus.

This isn't guaranteed to work, but it's worth a try:
1. Get out your Windows Emergency Bood Disk (you DID make one, didn't you?)
2. Restart your system and boot from it
3. At the prompt, type
FDISK /mbr
This will rewrite the bootsector and probably destroy any viruses stashing code there.
4. Restart your system normally and see what differenct this might have made.

P.S. WinZip can read .CAB files under Win95. Win98 reads them natively.


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[eggcat]

I tried booting from a clean disk and running FDISK /MBR, but it seemed to do nothing. I've scanned for viruses (using the latest update from Norton)and I had the kakworm virus, but now it is gone. Still the problem remains. I think I've got the situation narrowed down to this: Device Manager shows both IDE controllers are not functioning properly. I tried to remove them (in order to allow windows to "find" them again upon reboot) but I could not remove them as they are slaves of a master PCI controller. I couldn't delete the master without cutting off my hard disk. Eekk. So from what I can understand about this, I have hardware that functions just fine in DOS but cannot work under Windows. What to do?