Win98 (now) detects hard drives as 'generic'

[rani]

BIOS always autodetects and displays full info of my IBM and Seagate HDs

So did WIN98SE (before last Friday) under:
"Settings" -> "Device Manager" -> "Disk Drives"

... and you could see active checkboxes for the "Options" section and for the "Reserved drive letters"

Now, Windows detects them just as 'generic' drives and some checkboxes are grayed out. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/confused.gif


This came to happen after I spent 2 whole days trying to make an ATA100 IDE controller card work with my system.
(not gonna use it now... too many glitches... what a shame!)

This is what I did (several times):

-Install/uninstall the controller's drivers
-Move HDs from the mobo ide channels to the card ones
-Same as above for CD-rom, CD-RW and an LS-120
-Changed jumper settings on these devices
-Changed/swapped ribbon cables on these devices
-Fiddle around with drivers, vxd's, dll's (renaming
and trying other unknowledgeable dodgy tricks)

I had to re-intall video drivers because of a stuff up after I renamed ios.vxd and the Hi-Res GUI was lost.

I reinstalled IDE ATAPI MOBO drivers... also agpgart and other ones (the 4-in-1 VIA drivers). This did not cure the 'generic' detection.

I'm able to work (read/write) with both HDs, no problems... but it's bothering me that I can't get my configuration back.

I'm also concerned about the checkboxes not available.

I have tried removing the HDs from "Device Manager" and letting WIN re-detect upon reboot... doesn't fix it.

I don't know what else to try.

Any help will be appreciated !

[This message has been edited by rani (edited 04-16-2001).]

[sea69]

hi and **Welcome**

looking at your post, it's a wonder you can even get this to run at all. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/eek.gif

sounds like a posible registry corruption to me, when TRYING anything MAJOR- always- have a backup of a working registry.

you can try: boot to command prompt only, and type in : regedit /restore - and pick a working registry from before you did all this. ( if one is available)

while this may not be your problem, you have messed with allot of settings, some of which really didn't warrant messing with.

there will be others along to help with this so stand by. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif




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*another 'toaster' bites the dust*

[Randy_tx]

It sounds like your Hard Disk "Controller" drivers are still the drivers associated with the ATA100 card. Have you gone into Hard Disk Controller tab in Device Mgr. and removed the controller drivers? Unless I missread, you deleted the drives, but not the hard drive controller which must be reinstalled to get you back to square one.

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Will XP save Me ?

[sea69]

"Holy Mackeral Randy!!!" http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

he of 1000+ posts.. hehe

knew- when I replied to this I should have waited for you 1st. lol

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*another 'toaster' bites the dust*

[rani]

Thanks guys... it's nice to be welcomed! http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

I'll keep looking at this post for more info.

Well, I do not have a working backup of the registry that I can fall upon. At some point I tried some more tweaking http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/redface.gif and I ended up loading a primitive registry that came up with errors saying that my scanner's info was not available, etc, etc. I then reverted back to the registry I have now.

Randy: I believe I reintstalled the drivers for the HD controller when installing the 4-in-1 VIA package. Anyway, I did check in Device Manager and the drivers associated with the primary and secondary controller are:
-ESDI_506.pdr
-IOS.vxd

I checked in the Microsoft Knowledge database and the ESDI_506.pdr seems to be the one you should have.

The drivers for the VIA BUS master PCI IDE controller are:
-VMM32.vxd
-VATAPI.vxd ver 1.05 (latest version from VIA tech)

I think all these drivers are the ones I'm supposed to have.

I should have not renamed and fiddled around with IOS.vxd!!!... I think all my problems started after I did this.

Furthermore, now my LS-120 does not always get detected by the BIOS when I startup! It's on IDE 2 as slave... but that's another issue I'll deal with (maybe fauly cable/connection?... I'll check).

Also, yesterday I got rid of four fat16 partitions I had and clumped them into 1 big fat32 partition. After I restarted and formated and restarted again, an "MS-DOS compatibility mode" was showing up for this drive.
Today, it's not showing any more (??).
Instead, whenever the BIOS does not detect the LS-120, a fictitious Removable floppy a: device appears in windows as being in "MS-DOS compatibility mode" (?!?!)... the LS-120, however, is recognised by windows and assigned another letter (F: in my case)

Anyway, I'll keep trying things. Also, I don't want to bother people with heaps of questions... I'll go with this HD generic detection thing first.

As a side question: I thought about it and would really like to get the promise ata100 ide controller working 100% with Win98se. Which Forum topic should I refer to for help?

Thanks!... I'll be checking back soon.

Rani

PS. I'll make the effort to write shorter and sharper posts!

[This message has been edited by rani (edited 04-16-2001).]

[sea69]

sorry I wasn't of more help.. but at least you will probably remember in the future to have a good back up of your registry handy.

your questions are fine and thats what this board is here for.

try posting in "Buying and Upgrade" section. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

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*another 'toaster' bites the dust*

[rani]

Yep, I sure will have a registry backup (or several) !

Thanks for the support.

I still hope to get some more advice from other Forum users on this topic.

...and I'll probably look into the other forum you suggested for the IDE card installation.

Cheers,

Rani

[Paleo Pete]

1. you can try: boot to command prompt only, and type in : regedit /restore - and pick a working registry from before you did all this. ( if one is available)
scanreg /restore usually works for me...sea, you should know that, I'm surprised...

2. Try looking for system.da0 and user.da0 and rename them in DOS (Command Prompt Only from the boot menu) That will go back to the last registry known to be good. system.1st and user.1st will replace the registry with a copy made immediately after installing Windows. The downside is it won't have any entries related to anything instaled since then, you would have to re-register everything or reinstall programs. Look in C:\Windows\System for regsrvr32.exe and run it, that should re-register programs. Using the Run box type regsrvr32_program.exe using a space in place of the underscore ( _ ) used here. That should recreate registry entries for that program. Also use the name of the executable in place of program.exe.

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So many idiots, and only six bullets...
Note: Please post your questions on the forums, not in my email.

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

[rani]

I did manage to restore the system.1st registry, but it was lacking so much info that I preferred to go back to the current one instead (at least everything was identified and configured, etc, etc, even though the drives appeared as 'generic')

I tried to look for the *.dao files, but none were available.

However (and this was a surprise):

My second HD is used for backups. I have a complete backup of my first hard drive's info from 4 months back. So I got into the windows folder of the backup and edited the system.dat file with a registry editor (by then I had downloaded 3 editors) and checked it to find out that my drives -back then- had been identified as generic also! http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/eek.gif

This made me feel a bit dumb! http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/redface.gif

I think I know understand what happened.

I believe I got confused because the drives had been recognized by name (and not generic) when they had been connected to the IDE controller card.

So I somehow believed that was the original state... but now it seems otherwise... they had been detected by the OS as generic from the beginning! (I do feel a bit silly about this)

Can anyone verify this with your own computer? I think that most drives will be detected by Win98SE as 'generic'... can someone check this out, please?

So that's the story

Additionally, I have no more problems with my LS-120 and no more "MS-DOS compatibility" issues either.

Everything seems to be working just fine.

And to top things up, I have decided to keep the ATA/100 ide card and have already installed it with its drivers and have managed to get the CD-rom to work under this card.

So now I have my 5 ide devices all hooked up and running with, apparently, (...tapping on some wood now...) no problems.

There's still an issue with connecting any of my hard drives to the card. When I do this I still experience problems with windows' behaviour in some aspects... but I will deal with this... and my CD-rom seems to work fine with the card... so I'm keeping it and leaving the configuration as it is.

It does seem ironic, though, that connection of the devices for which the card is intended somehow have undesirable results with the OS, but not so for other IDE devices not intended to be used with the card (go figure!...).

That's all folks. That's my current status.

Hey, thanks a lot for all your help... that goes to everyone. That usage of regsrvr32_program.exe will be stored in 'my mental hard drive'. It's great to pick up tips and learn from all these things. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

If I find any more relevant happenings I will post some more info.

Catch you later

(and again... I wrote a HUGE message!.. hope I didn't bore you to death)

[sea69]

how did I do that ??

gotta be MORE CAREFULL!!

sorry.. deep apologies... http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/redface.gif http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/eek.gif http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/redface.gif http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/frown.gif http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/tongue.gif

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*another 'toaster' bites the dust*

[rani]

http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/tongue.gif Yeah! http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/tongue.gif

Now, I'm looking into the issues with the ATA/100 card. It appears that the card could be faulty (oh boy!... when will all this stop! http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/frown.gif)

I hope not... but I have already done all the possible permutations with my 5 IDE devices aroung the onboard and card IDE channels, disabled/enabled the channels both in the BIOS and in Win98SE, swapped card from one slot to another, flashed BIOSes and updated drivers, etc, etc... a looong etc.

So here I am.

Believe or not, I'm happy about the drive thing! http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

And if worse comes to worse (i.e., dud card with slim chance of return because I got it (by accident) from the US via air mail) I can still plug one CD-rom drive in it and there go my 5 IDE devices!

Cheers!

See ya' later

[Paleo Pete]

Never paid much attention to it, but just looked, and my drives are listed as Generic too. Once I thought about it they always have been, and as far as I can remember that's been the case on every win95/98 computer I've used or worked on. Same for the floppy drives.

sea69: No problem, just figured you were asleep at the wheel...not all that uncommon around here, I think most of us sometimes stay up wayyyy too late trying to do what we can...

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So many idiots, and only six bullets...
Note: Please post your questions on the forums, not in my email.

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

[tjaymadison]

HD's connected to add-on controllers can appear to the system as "quasi SCSI" devices. Sometimes this depends on how the drivers are written. Although it seems unintuitive, when you do have the boot drive connected to the controller, setting the boot sequence option in BIOS setup to use SCSI first may solve this.

As a side note, wouldn't you think with all the MS raves and brags about Plug & Play, that they could do better than "Generic IDE Disk Type 47"? My BIOS identifies my DVD and HD's by mfr and even model number, so the info must be available somewhere in the drive's firmware. Device Manager does show the DVD mfr and model, so why can't it do the same for the HD's? I know it doesn't affect performance, but it's just a pet peeve of mine. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/rolleyes.gif

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"When I nod my head, hit it with the hammer."
(Moe, holding nail, to Curly, holding hammer)

[rani]

Originally posted by tjaymadison:
HD's connected to add-on controllers can appear to the system as "quasi SCSI" devices. Sometimes this depends on how the drivers are written. Although it seems unintuitive, when you do have the boot drive connected to the controller, setting the boot sequence option in BIOS setup to use SCSI first may solve this.

Yep, I suppose it does help. I can boot from the ide card, no problem.

...they could do better than "Generic IDE Disk Type 47"?

I agree with this too. Why can't the OS give the info that the BIOS pulls out of the HDs??... when such HDs are connected to the external card they appear as going through an SCSI adapter (just as you mentioned) and their info does appear in Device Manager (the root of my confusion). So what's so "special" about this and so impossible about the usual onboard IDE dectection?

By now, MS should have done better in this and in several other aspects (don't you think?)