i need sone primary/secondary ide controller help

[stanger]

my neighbor installed a 20GB western digital in their pc and they used the WD software that came with it to setup the drive , now the primary/secondary ide controller in the device manager has yellow flags beside them , what can be a fix for this ?

thanks stanger

 

[sohcrates]

well, you're best bet is to remove the primary/secondary controllers from device manager and let windows find them again and hopefully it will re-install the drivers correctly. 90% of the time this works for me, but i HAVE seen cases where device manager still reports problems BUT everything works just dandy.

removing the ide controllers from windows might cause a system freeze, so you might have to remove them from safe mode instead.

give it a reboot and good luck!

 

[Vinny N]

On Sohcrates suggestion...

---if you can only remove the parent device from the device manager, if you want to remove the primary and secondary controllers, run regedit, goto the branch "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum\MF" and delete the appropriate 2 branches


Some possibilities:

-this first possibility is one I recently saw, when installing a new 20gb WD drive, so I suggest this one first.
---after trying about a dozen things, I open up the case, look at the jumpers, they were correct, and it looked like it should have worked without any problems(I guess the motherboard/win98/drive didn't like it no matter how correct it looked), but I had nothing left to try, so I tried each jumper setting, and then boot into windows. One of them took the drive out of compatibility mode and removed the exclamation mark from the ide controller it was on.


some more farfetched possibilities...


-it was drive overlay software was it (then it might have added a .386 file that loads on bootup, this can cause it)
---remove it the line that loads it from the system.ini and restart the system

-ide controllers just got a little confused and disabled 32 bit transfers
---goto this branch of the registry "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\IOS", if there's an item named "noide", delete it and restart the system.

-ide controllers+windows are extremely confused and IOS.LOG in C:\windows reports a "ESDI head mismatch"
---either a drive is bad, doesn't like the master/slave settings it's on, or the primary/secondardy channel it's on, or the other ide device that it is sitting with.
---only way to confirm is to do a fresh format and reinstall and see if the IDE controllers+IDE devices are just as unhappy.

 

[doubledc]

try vinneys "noide" trick that one worked for me after the same problem left my hard drives in DOS mode. also other than the problems how did you like the WD utilities? I thought it worked alot better than any other method of copying drive to drive(at least for free) that I,ve used.

 

[billandopus]

I solved my secondary IDE controller problem (yellow flag - major conflict with my Plextor)
by download and installing an IDE driver upgrade from my mobo mfg website (ASUS).

If you have already removed your IDE devices and then rebooted to see whether or not your OS (Winblows, I presume) detects your hardware fine ... then i'd seriously look at the driver issue. Many times it's a conflict between your mobo and your hardware where one cannot recognize the other properly thus the IDE conflict.

Good luck.

 

[DaddyG]

My guess is that they used the WD software overlay because the BIOS in their system did not support more than 8gig drives. They need to update the BIOS to the version that supports INT13 extensions, allows 4 extra bits to address the cylinder, head and sector. The overlay software often loads into the MBR and Windows won't load the correct 32-bit protected mode drivers if it thinks that the MBR has been modified. Try booting the system in Safe Mode. I have found msgs show up in Safe Mode that do not show up in Normal Boot.