Forcing drivers in XP

[elkinm]

A friend of mine has XP on an old K6-2 550 with the SIS 530 shipset. The problem is that with the Windows default drivers his hard drive which supports up to ATA100 is only detected as PIO mode 4. And without DMA it is extremely slow. I know that his system is not the best for running XP but it is to slow as I have seen system a similar 300 MHZ K6-2 system run XP more or less normaly. The bios detects it as UDMA 4 or UDMA/66 so I am quite sure the problem is windows. I tried reinstalling the drivers and forcing DMA through the registry but nothing works. Now I am trying to install the SIS drievers for win 2000 but when I select the ini file to look for drivers it XP says that this location has no information about my hardware. I've tried uninstalling the drivers and tried updating to the SIS drivers or installing new hardware with those drivers and every time I get the same error.

I would epretiate any help getting DMA to work but most importanly I need some way to force XP to install these drivers without saying that it does not match my hardware.

This is what I realy realy hate about XP and the newer windows vertions and I wish I had the good old 98 or 95 where if I choose select hardware from a disk and point to a driver file it told me exactly what was there and installed whatever drver I wanted without a second thought and now installing drivers is nothing but a hastle espetialy with XP.

Please help me and my friend.

Thanks

 

[NogginBoink]

Blame Windows XP if you'd like, but the fault is not with the operating system.

What's happening is that the OS is querying the hardward for its PnP ID and the drivers you're trying to install are telling the OS that they are not appropriate for the hardware. Either you've got the wrong drivers (likely), or the person who wrote them didn't include the PnP ID of the chipset that he was supposed to (possible, but less likely).

 

[elkinm]

Possibly but my goal is to dissable this Windows XP driver checking problem. I once had to install drivers for my modem but the drivers named the hardware under a diferent name so windows XP alway said that the drivers did not mach the hardware. Well after a lot of work and removing and reinstaling the hardware and manualy instaling the mored after renaming the windows driver cache files I maneged to install only the new drivers for the modem and they work great. After enabling the cab and ini files XP did not try to change the drivers thankfully but when I tried installing the old drivers it had before I once aggain got the not right for the hardware error, suggesting that most likely, the windows detection and instalation problem is mostly not related to the actual drivers and their ability to work with the hardware.

I also tried installing new hardware just to see what was in the drivers and windows would install them so theoreticaly, I would expect XP to install the drivers normaly as I did not specify which hardware it is for and XP should not know on its own.

These drivers are strait from SIS so I would hope that they are good if they are still online and have not been fixed, but if windows does have some problem detecting them, please help me modify the drivers or somehow trick XP into installing them. If whatever I do makes the system inoperable I can always restore it with a repair install of XP, but I would prefer not to have to.

I still want some way to disable windows checking and force XP to install any drivers I choose. I know how to make XP except unsighned drivers but I have no idea how to fix this little problem.

Thanks