Still_A_Learner
02-27-2001, 02:49 PM
My CD R/W drive has vanished (and also one of my 2 hard disks !) At startup, BIOS seems to find all 4 IDE devices (2 HD's and 2 CDROM's), but Device manager only sees 1 HD and 1 CD drive. However, in "Safe Mode" all devices are seen by Device Manager (the CD's are in fact duplicated !) I have tried removing all the CD drives in safe mode (device manager) and rebooted into normal mode, but only one HD is subsequently reported in Device manager and one CD (the 32x drive).
Apologies, my setup is :-
Primary Master: Maxtor 9.1 GB HD (partitioned into C:, E:, F:, G:, H:, I http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif
Primary Slave: LG CD writer 8083B
Secondary master: Fujitsu 6.4 GB HD (partitioned into D:, J:, K:, L http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif
Secondary Slave: Generic CD drive (32x)
O/S: Windows 95B
motherboard: A-Trends 6220
The strange thing is that it is the Primary Master HD (boot disk) that has vanished from Device Manager (in normal mode), but I can access all files (and obviously boot up !) Also, the missing CD drive is ALSO a Primary IDE device.
It seems logical to me that the Primary IDE controller driver could be "damaged" (but I don't know how to go about reloading this). I suspect that it happens automatically when installing Windows 95 - is this correct ? If I reinstall WIN95 onto the existing C: drive partition and then copy the registry files (system.da0 and user.da0) back to C:, will this cure the HD / CD drive recognition problem, and also preserve all my program installations on other partitions of the same hard disk ?
Or is there an easier solution ?
I am shameful to admit that I was "dabbling" with overclocking(FSB from 66MHz to 75 MHz) prior to this "failure" but only for less than an hour - I guess this will have caused the problem even though there were no immediate failure symptoms - it was only when I went to use the CD R/W that I found that it had vanished ! At about the same time, I enabled DMA (in device manager) for the Primary HD, but I doubt that this has anything to do with the problem. Everything had been fine for months before that.
I'll be very grateful for any help on this !!
Apologies, my setup is :-
Primary Master: Maxtor 9.1 GB HD (partitioned into C:, E:, F:, G:, H:, I http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif
Primary Slave: LG CD writer 8083B
Secondary master: Fujitsu 6.4 GB HD (partitioned into D:, J:, K:, L http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif
Secondary Slave: Generic CD drive (32x)
O/S: Windows 95B
motherboard: A-Trends 6220
The strange thing is that it is the Primary Master HD (boot disk) that has vanished from Device Manager (in normal mode), but I can access all files (and obviously boot up !) Also, the missing CD drive is ALSO a Primary IDE device.
It seems logical to me that the Primary IDE controller driver could be "damaged" (but I don't know how to go about reloading this). I suspect that it happens automatically when installing Windows 95 - is this correct ? If I reinstall WIN95 onto the existing C: drive partition and then copy the registry files (system.da0 and user.da0) back to C:, will this cure the HD / CD drive recognition problem, and also preserve all my program installations on other partitions of the same hard disk ?
Or is there an easier solution ?
I am shameful to admit that I was "dabbling" with overclocking(FSB from 66MHz to 75 MHz) prior to this "failure" but only for less than an hour - I guess this will have caused the problem even though there were no immediate failure symptoms - it was only when I went to use the CD R/W that I found that it had vanished ! At about the same time, I enabled DMA (in device manager) for the Primary HD, but I doubt that this has anything to do with the problem. Everything had been fine for months before that.
I'll be very grateful for any help on this !!