Problem w/ Secondary IDE controller and IDE devices on it.

[? (=Þ)]

This hard drive has gone from a Socket7 mobo, to an upgraded super7 mobo, and finally now has a P2 400 w/ a Via Chipset. The problem is, it has the same basic copy of windows through all of these, and now WinME installed on top of it.

The cdrom/cdrw, both on the 2ndary IDE channel doesnt work, it isnt seen in explorer. In the device manager, there is a problem w/ the 2ndary IDE controller. From safe mode, the primary and 2ndary IDE controllers are listed 3 different times...I think its each from the previous mobo chipset's IDE/Primary controller installs. I cant remove them! It has the "must remove parent device", but the parent device is already removed. Anyone know how to fix this?

I don't want to reinstall windows if its possbile because there is a ton of stuff on this, programs, etc, and it is gonna be a hassle to reinstall everything......

ThankS!

 

[bacillus]

don't want to be the bearer of bad news but if you can't delete those ghost controllers in safe mode then you'll really need a fresh install!

 

[SilentRunning]

Does it list the parent device. It should be the Ide bus mastering controller. If this is still listed under hard drives remove it.

Have you simply moved this hard drive to a new system???

If so, as a last resort I would remove all of the motherboard devices in the device manager's system folder and reinstall the drivers for your new motherboard. Before you do this make sure you have those drivers and your windows disk handy.

 

[? (=Þ)]

It did list the parent devices.... I removed them, but they left the primary/2ndary controller drivers there... and there isnt anything left to remove. the systems were upgraded piece by piece, mainly a new mobo/cpu/ram combo every once in a while. Any other thoughts?

 

[SilentRunning]

Is the secondary ide channel enabled in the motherboard bios???

You could remove the device drivers manually by looking in the driver/driver file details in the device manager and writing down the files used.
Then manually deleting them.

Have you tried deleting the disk drives from the device manager. A reboot will restore them.

Added: Have you tried disconnecting the power to your cdrom/cdrw on the secondary channel and booting your system. Then seeing if you can remove the device drivers. Have you verified that both of the device are not set to be masters.

Are you still booting in safe mode or have you tried to do a full boot yet? Are unable to boot in anything but safe mode?

 

[? (=Þ)]

yes its enabled in the bios
i will try writing down the file names and deleting them manually. thats one thing i havent heard of yet.
yes, i have tried removing all drives in device manager, in safe mode to remove any repeat driver installs. rebooted to windows to reinstall the current driver configs. still have the problem.
already tried running w/o connecting the two drives, and no both arent set as masters. If they were, i wouldnt have been able to bootup w/o noticing the error message as my bios auto detects all 4 IDE devices on every bootup.
I can bootup normally. Just cannot get any device to run off the 2ndary ide channel.

keep those ideas coming, ill try out the manual deletion of the files in use. Thou i dont think it will help as i have a feeling the drivers in use, are used by all 3 primary/2ndary ide channels, generic drivers. The setup of each I believe are configured in the registry, which i dunno where to look... can anyone expand on this idea w/ some registry strings to look at?

 

[SilentRunning]

Do NOT I repeat do not delete ios.vxd

If you do you won't be able to boot. I tried a few things including that but the entry was still there and I had the same message you said you got that you must delete the parent.

 

[SilentRunning]

Try a read here at this link

Text